London

A CGI image of how the Royal Festival Hall will look (click to enlarge)

We pause just outside the entrances to the freshly renovated auditorium. Paul Appleton of Allies and Morrison, the architects responsible for the Royal Festival Hall’s two-year makeover, grins at me madly for a moment. ‘This,’ he says as we prepare to enter the auditorium, ‘is going to be very, very exciting.’

Frankly I’m not sure I can take much more excitement. So far the refurbished Royal Festival Hall has been an astonishing revelation, one that few Londoners outside of the design team could have seriously imagined when the building shut down in July 2005.

Ian Blackburn, project manager for Southbank Centre, has joined Time Out and Appleton for a pre-opening tour of the site and attempts to put the two-year refit into context: ‘You are looking at the scale and ambition of a £91 million project. This has been heroic – one hell of a big building project. We took everything out and opened up the building, both inside and outside. We hoped to realise the ambitions of the original designers and architects, but also create a building that will be a great cultural centre in the future.’
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Jude Kelly, artistic director of Southbank Centre, later admits, ‘There was a moment sometime before January when we really thought: Are we going to be able to open on time?’ But today, a few weeks short of reopening, the team are quietly confident.

The new net and ball carpet

The Royal Festival Hall was built just as the postwar era was giving way to the 1950s, in a burst of optimism about the possibilities ahead. Possibilities that were to be celebrated at the 1951 Festival of Britain. The original London County Council (LCC) design team of Leslie Martin, Peter Moro and Robert Matthews aimed for ‘an embellished modernism’, a friendly – quirky even – approach to the predominant style of the era that can be seen, most famously, in the Derbyshire fossil layer limestone. Used throughout the building, in the interior, it’s polished to a clear shine that reveals the hundreds of tiny sea creatures trapped within it. The Royal Festival Hall was to be a Thameside flagship for modernism, but a modernism that smiled rather than grimaced at the bombed-out Bankside around it.

Despite the widespread war damage in the area, the Royal Festival Hall was built on a comparatively small footprint. The ‘egg in the box’ design, as Martin called it – the auditorium balanced within the walls, with space above, below and at the sides for bars, restaurants and public areas – was a deliberate architectural response to the constrictions of the site. Funds were also limited and the team of enthusiastic young architects were dispatched to the docks to see what materials were available there (which is partly why there is so much imported wood in the building).

Back in January this year there was no wood here in the auditorium at all, as it was all away being reconditioned, and 30 miles of scaffolding was stacked on the floor. Now the walls are clad in refurbished elm and walnut panels that cast a warm glow around the hall, fanning out and up from a stage. The stage itself has been completely rebuilt and balances on specially designed steel coils that can be positioned in 12 different configurations and lowered or raised in sections, making it possible to roll everything, from the biggest concert grand piano to the smallest stool, straight on to the performance area.

Handrails with their distinctive 'finger groove'

The architects found an extra metre of room at the back of the stage, which has made it possible to provide a 40-foot dancefloor at the front if required, changing the hall from a classical venue that occasionally puts on slightly uncomfortable rock, jazz and world music gigs into a multi-functional space at home with every type of performance.

Three rows have been taken out of the stalls allowing for a generous 75 inches of legroom. Above, the famous undulating boxes, called a joke by modernist French architect Le Corbusier when they were first revealed – albeit a ‘good joke’ – have been reconditioned and the individual tapestries in each one renovated. The mixing desk, which used to block the view for many in the rear stalls, now drops down into the void directly beneath the egg.

It’s an impressive mixture of old and new, incorporating the original architects’ vision and twenty-first century technology and requirements. As such, the auditorium defines all the difficulties involved in updating a building as iconic as the Royal Festival Hall: do you work with or against the original team? Do you renovate or reinvent? This interaction with the now legendary design team that created the Royal Festival Hall was a key part of the project’s appeal for Appleton and his partners at Allies and Morrison. ‘A lot of it was reinterpretation, but that’s the nub with conservation – what do you extract, what do you repair? The task was to resurrect the best of what had gone before and to add and update. The building has to change or it will collapse.’

An auditorium chair, now wooden underneath

Blackburn uses a neat analogy to define the experience: ‘It’s like being a musician playing a piece of music on an instrument that didn’t exist when the composer first wrote the piece. It’s creative, but subordinate to the composer. It’s conversation with the people who made the building.’

This is not the first major renovation. In 1964 Martin had a conversation with his own work when he returned with a new generation of LCC architects and added elevations on the riverside and Belvedere Road flanks. The compression joint where the later work joins the earlier can be seen all the more clearly now the Portland stone-cladding has been cleaned.

Thirty years later in 1994, Allies and Morrison were appointed as house architects. By 2005 their 11 years’ experience of the building meant no one was better qualified to renovate it than them: two of the team had studied under Martin and others had been briefed by chief designer Peter Moro before his death in 1999. ‘We owe the original team so much,’ says Appleton. ‘We respected them and wanted to take it on. In many ways we were talking to the original team – we wanted to recapture the spirit of the Festival.’

Adding the finishing touches to the refurb

The Festival of Britain was a democratic event, the pet project of Labour Party deputy leader Herbert Morrison and one of the last major projects of Attlee’s second postwar Labour administration. It was a chance for the ordinary man to see his future and as such it was important that the ordinary man could successfully move around its key – and now only remaining – edifice.

Perhaps counterintuitively to our more river-aware age, the site’s original axis was east-west, the main access points being the high level Hungerford entrance on the western side and the low-level Waterloo entrance on the eastern side. Visitors were brought up or down to a central area on level two where there was a bar and, latterly, an exhibition space situated on top of a sprung wooden ballroom floor. 1951 was a key year in the development of modernism in Britain, but it was a different Britain to the one we know now, with (despite five years of Labour government) a still rigid class system and a penchant for formal dances.

During the 1964 additions a new entrance was created on the riverside and further well-meaning but mistaken decisions, like curtains on windows designed to allow light to pour through the central sections, caused the original purpose, plans and functions of the building to be forgotten. Opening up level two and its foyers for daytime performances in the 1980s was a cultural success, but it added to the general clutter and by 1990 the interior of the building was confused and clogged.

The beautiful new ceiling in the auditorium

‘The flow of people,’ says Appleton, ‘both through and around the building had been impeded by the changes of 1964 and a gradual accumulation of clutter. We wanted to undo that damage and improve it to a point that had never really been possible before.’

They have succeeded. The ballroom area has been reconditioned and the whole of level two opened up so natural light as well as people can travel through. The old famously sloping pit in front of the bar has been filled in, the bar raised, and the wooden panels drilled out to improve the acoustics. Looking back towards the river side of the building, you can now see all the staircases that will lead you up or down through it, and for the first time since 1964, the unified building makes sense.

The main entrance is once more undoubtedly the Waterloo entrance, now referrred to as Southbak Centre Square entrance, and on the exterior a new limestone and granite staircase has been erected between this entrance and the riverside. In the space immediately inside the doors, the cloakroom has been pushed back and a new lift installed that punches through to the top of the building.

Strangely, given that the Royal Festival Hall was conceived and built at the end of a world war that had wounded and crippled thousands of Britons, there was next to no access for wheelchairs in the original design, and some of the lifts delivered visitors to areas where there were another three steps up to the main floor. Today the entire building is wheelchair accessible – even the roof, now clear of the unsightly portable buildings that were home to Hayward administrators ejected from County Hall after the GLC was abolished in 1986.

Robin Day's refurbished auditorium seats

The roof terraces offer the pure vision of the original team. Though you can’t see from the street, the roof is now dominated by a revealed pair of white conning-towers-cum-liner funnels that house the pipes and services. Cleared of clutter and painted white they are redolent of Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles. The renovated rooftop pergolas will be available to hire for private events.

On the river terrace below, brutalist balustrades have been replaced with glass, meaning you can now see out to the river from inside the building. The lower walkway has been renamed ‘Festival Riverside’ and is lined with glass-fronted cafés and shops, while the 1964 mushroom columns that were built over the 1951 car park have been taken inside the façades.

The shops and cafés are just one element of a strategy that has sought to remove much of the extraneous activity from the inside of the building and either place it on the reworked terraces or in the new glass and steel extension alongside the railway. ‘The new building released 35 per cent extra space in the main building,’ says Blackburn. ‘That’s why we can do this.’ The 1964 entrance on the riverside has been capped with a glass ‘lantern’ and the signage has been rationalised, so now a walk by the river turns naturally into a walk through the Royal Festival Hall, with staircases taking you up to walkways covered with exact replicas of Peter Moro’s especially commissioned ‘net and ball’ carpet. On level four, the famously small bar has been enlarged and extended so the traditional agonised interval queue for a drink should be a thing of the past. One bar you probably won’t see is the artists’ bar at the back of the stage, a glorious wood-panelled 1980s creation, itself now a strange survivor of a bygone age.
Also backstage, the dressing rooms and showers – which, apart from in the stars’ rooms, were separate – have been completely reworked. No longer will administrators encounter naked Russian ballet dancers in the corridor. Wandering through from the dressing rooms, we emerge at the back of the stage where the 1954 organ is being refurbished. There is a palpable sense of awe in the room. ‘Normally,’ says Appleton, ‘you live with a building and you get used to it. But there has been a sense of surprise, almost shock. We’ve been marvelling at the space.’

We silently marvel the coming together of old and new, of concrete, leather and wood. Around us hundreds of refurbished Robin Day seats march out in rows to the walls. Earlier this year the 90-year-old Day visited the site. He walked round in wonder touching the walls until, in tears, he said, ‘I stayed alive for this.’

It’s that kind of building.