The Royal Albert Hall Archive Opens After £1m Rescue Operation

The Royal Albert Hall’s priceless archive has been preserved for future generations by an urgent £1m rescue operation.

The collection – which includes a trumpet from the opening ceremony, a programme designed by Pablo Picasso, and the ‘hammercloth’ still used for Royal visits – had been housed in four different, unsuitable locations within the building, and repeated flooding of its basement store was threatening the irreplaceable artefacts.

This new £1m project brings the entire Royal Albert Hall Archive together in one secure, fire-proof, climate-controlled location for the first time, complete with a new reading room, and is open to historians, researchers and members of the public by appointment. The archive tells the story of the venue from its inception in the 1850s to the present day, and consists of tens of thousands of items, including ephemera from almost every performance held at the Hall during its 152-year history.

James Ainscough, Chief Executive of the Royal Albert Hall, said: “The archive contains priceless assets of national and international cultural significance, recording the history of the Hall and everyone that has appeared on its stage for over 150 years, and this project ensures the protection of these artefacts for future generations.

“This famous building has been a crucible of debate, a place of cultural and social transformation, and a prism through which to see a changing Britain. No other venue on earth has played host to the Suffragettes, Albert Einstein and Muhammed Ali, as well as Ella Fitzgerald, The Beatles and Adele. The archive brings these extraordinary events to life, allowing you to come closer to history.”

The £1m redevelopment will also allow the Hall’s archivists to conduct tours of the archive for the first time, and expand their engagement work with local schools and community groups.

Other unique items within the collection are a model from the 1860s showing the proposed building, costumes from the staggeringly successful 1930s production of Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s Hiawatha, and a ceremonial broom used during the Grand Sumo Tournament in 1991 – the first and only time the sport had been staged outside Japan during its 1,500-year history.

The archive also contains a programme from the first sci-fi convention ever held in the UK – in 1891 – a souvenir book from the incomparably lavish Shakespeare Ball in 1911, incorporating specially-commissioned pieces from George Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton, and the artists’ guestbooks containing messages written by countless global figures since the 1990s. And then there is the pulsocon: a vibrating device shown off at the Hall in the 1910s, which its inventor claimed could cure gout, rheumatism and 'women's diseases', prior to his unmasking as a fraud by medical students.

Today, the Hall is also launching its Most Wanted appeal, as it tries to track down the 40 most notable items still missing from its collection. These include the silver trowel used in laying its first brick in November 1867, ephemera from Captain Scott’s 1910 presentation on his then-recent expedition to the North Pole, and a programme from Janis Joplin’s legendary 1969 show, her only ever solo headline performance in the UK. The first of the 40 long-sought-after items – a programme for an anti-suffrage rally in 1912 – was located last week, and has been added to the archive.

The new archive space was created with the generous support of donors, including the Charles Hayward Foundation, Royal Albert Hall America and the Thompson Family Charitable Trust. 

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