The Royal Albert Hall: Building the Arts and Sciences

The Royal Albert Hall was originally intended to be a ‘Central Hall of Arts and Sciences’, following Prince Albert’s vision for South Kensington and beyond. The talk will show how this building, intimately connected with the early V&A, was a crucible for innovation. Illustrious techniques from antiquity were reimagined for the new mechanical age, placing the Hall at the heart of a process of collecting, describing, and systematising arts and practices. At the same time, the Hall was conceived as a ‘manifesto’ of what the Victorians thought Britain ought to be, at a crucial moment of its socio-economic history: a symbolic cultural hub for the Empire’s metropole.