AT noon on Wednesday, March 29, 1871, Queen Victoria set off in a royal cavalcade of nine closed carriages from Buckingham Palace for the official opening of the Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences in South Kensington. Undeterred by a biting wind, large crowds assembled to line the route and an audience of nearly 8,000 people gathered in the building itself. A report in The Times marvelled at the ease and speed with which this glittering assembly took their seats in what was then one of the largest roofed interiors in Europe (Fig 8). Moments before the formal proceedings began, everyone present in this great amphitheatre, including 900 singers and 200 instrumentalists, stilled themselves to allow a photographer with a stereoscopic camera to record the scene.
As the Queen entered the hall, the audience rose to their feet. She wrote in her journal that the ‘intensely crowded’ space ‘made me feel quite giddy’. In a short speech of welcome by the Prince of Wales—rendered awkward by the echoing acoustics, a problem that dogged the interior until the installation of 135 suspended fibre-glass diffusers in 1969 (now reduced to 85)—the hall was described as having been built without government money and in fulfilment of the ‘long-cherished design’ of his late father, the Prince Consort, Albert (after whom, of course, it was named) ‘for the encouragement of the Arts and Sciences’.
Denne historien er fra March 24, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra March 24, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Give it some stick
Galloping through the imagination, competitive hobby-horsing is a gymnastic sport on the rise in Britain, discovers Sybilla Hart
Paper escapes
Steven King selects his best travel books of 2024
For love, not money
This year may have marked the end of brag-art’, bought merely to show off one’s wealth. It’s time for a return to looking for connoisseurship, beauty and taste
Mary I: more bruised than bloody
Cast as a sanguinary tyrant, our first Queen Regnant may not deserve her brutal reputation, believes Geoffrey Munn
A love supreme
Art brought together 19th-century Norwich couple Joseph and Emily Stannard, who shared a passion for painting, but their destiny would be dramatically different
Private views
One of the best ways-often the only way-to visit the finest privately owned gardens in the country is by joining an exclusive tour. Non Morris does exactly that
Shhhhhh...
THERE is great delight to be had poring over the front pages of COUNTRY LIFE each week, dreaming of what life would be like in a Scottish castle (so reasonably priced, but do bear in mind the midges) or a townhouse in London’s Eaton Square (worth a king’s ransom, but, oh dear, the traffic) or perhaps that cottage in the Cotswolds (if you don’t mind standing next to Hollywood A-listers in the queue at Daylesford). The estate agent’s particulars will give you details of acreage, proximity to schools and railway stations, but never—no, never—an indication of noise levels.
Mission impossible
Rubble and ruin were all that remained of the early-19th-century Villa Frere and its gardens, planted by the English diplomat John Hookham Frere, until a group of dedicated volunteers came to its rescue. Josephine Tyndale-Biscoe tells the story
When a perfect storm hits
Weather, wars, elections and financial uncertainty all conspired against high-end house sales this year, but there were still some spectacular deals
Give the dog a bone
Man's best friend still needs to eat like its Lupus forebears, believes Jonathan Self, when it's not guarding food, greeting us or destroying our upholstery, of course
