The Royal Albert Hall in London. Find all about the one of the most luxurious performance stage in the world.
Address: Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2AP, United Kingdom The Royal Albert hall is one of the most spacious and luxurious performance stages in the world. It holds more than 300 concerts per year. It was officially opened in March 1871 with a speech from Edward, the former Prince of Wales. The previous Queen Victoria who overseen the building work was to overcome with emotion to open the hall. It was not always going to be called the royal Albert hall it was going to be called Central Hall to promote understanding and appreciation of the Arts and Sciences, but changes in circumstances gave its current name. The Royal Albert is a grade one listed building it has had that status from when it was built. The main auditorium has an organ that is the second biggest in the UK. The cost for building was £200,000 for such a fine building is not the largest amount spent. One problem did remain when the hall was originally built the sound was all wrong everything seemed to echo but they did fix this by 1969. It has a capacity of over 5000 people. The most well-known performance is the BBC proms which is a popular annual eight-week summer season of daily range of music, performed to the highest standards. They moved the proms to the royal Albert hall because the BBC could not support it back in 1940 because of the war. This did change but the proms did then stay at the hall. Some of the world's biggest stars have only been able to dream of performing on its stage. The people who have are some of the greatest performers in the world. The most ever popular performance was from Swedish pop group Abba. They played all the way back in 1977 more than 3.5 million people wanted tickets but ABBA sold it out 660 times over. One of the more different performances was boxing it had great fighters such as Muhammad Ali, Lennox Lewis and Frank Bruno. There was an even more sinister fight with English gangster twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray fought Bobby Manito in interests Ronny was disqualified for head butting not the English way to fight in the ring but Reggie did win a fight. Other famous names that have played include the Beatles, Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli and meat loaf. Albert Einstein also gave one of the greatest speeches in the history of the Royal Albert Hall. Other events in the hall have included ice hockey tennis and ballet and In 1991, the Royal Albert Hall hosted the only official sumo wrestling tournament held outside Japan.