Royal Festival Hall: A Living Icon, published by Merrell, launches today (16 April 2026), bringing together architects, musicians, historians and cultural programmers to tell the story of one of London's best-loved buildings. Published to coincide with the 75th anniversary of its opening, the book features 21 written contributions covering different aspects of the hall, from its architectural history to the story of its famous organ and the life of its production team, illustrated with photography specially commissioned from architectural photographer Edmund Sumner.
Royal Festival Hall first opened on London's South Bank in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain. It was the first major modern public building in post-war Britain, conceived as a symbol of national recovery. As British art historian Dan Cruickshank describes it in his foreword, the hall was ‘a tangible expression of a burning desire to create a better society after the destruction inflicted on London during the Second World War’.
The architects Robert Matthew and Leslie Martin faced significant practical challenges – the site was hemmed in by railway lines and required draining before construction could begin. Few concert halls of this scale had been built before, and space was tight. Their solution was to raise the auditorium as an ‘egg within a box’ – the inner auditorium suspended inside the building's outer envelope – which also provided acoustic isolation from the surrounding noise.
Inside, walls, stage canopy and floor were clad in elm, sycamore and birch, with teak ribs along the lower sections. The cantilevered seating boxes, which project outward from the sides of the auditorium, drew admiration even from Le Corbusier, who called them ‘a joke, but a good one’.
The building was not universally welcomed. In 1951, the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham told the Liverpool Echo that he questioned whether ‘in 350 years there has ever been erected on the soil of this grand old country a more repellent, a more unattractive, a more ugly and more monstrous structure’.
Yet its intentions were primarily social: unlike traditional concert halls, it was designed without class divisions – no separate bars or entrances for different audiences. The foyers were conceived as open civic spaces, and the building was intended to welcome everyone, whether attending a performance by a world-famous orchestra or stopping in for a cup of coffee.
The Royal Festival Hall during its construction
The hall has since been awarded Grade I-listed status, recognising it as a building of exceptional historic and architectural importance. Whatever reservations greeted it in 1951, it has long since become an integral part of London's cultural life.