It's a winner: the reborn festival hall

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5 April 2012

The sense of space strikes you first, sheer generous expanses undulating over different levels, like a rectangular version of the English countryside.

In the revamped Royal Festival Hall, it is the uncluttering of the foyers, and the opening up of views through their big windows in four directions, to river, trees and surrounding buildings, that make the most visible change.

The £111 million refurbishment, by architects Allies and Morrison, returns the building to the free spirit of the young architects who designed and built the original hall in three years (1948-51), for just over £2 million.

In a city where space is now bought and branded, where anything empty and untrammelled is seen as an opportunity to be sweated, this generous expanse is even more miraculous than it was when it was first built. The hall, which officially reopens in two weeks, is a marker of how much London has changed in half a century.

It has seen its surroundings ebb and flow around it: the deathly white commercial slab of the Shell Centre next door, the concrete geology of the rest of the South Bank Centre and the arrival of the London Eye, eloquent monument to the triumph of leisure.

It has seen the perky pylons of the made-over Hungerford Bridge arrive, and the inexorable spread of white paint and glass sheets, which for more than a decade have been the emblems of well-intentioned public improvements. And in these years architectural galacticos have produced a succession of unbuilt proposals for the whole or parts of the South Bank, including Richard Rogers, Terry Farrell, Rafael Viñoly, David Chipperfield, Foreign Office Architects, Cedric Price and Rick Mather.

It has also seen the change from the high idealism of post-war Labour Britain, of which the Royal Festival Hall is itself a monument, to the disaffection of the Seventies, to Thatcher's embracing of free enterprise, to the current cusp of government and the well-lubricated prosperity that has grown out of Blair ' s friendlier Thatcherism.

It was itself a landmark in this change. In the Nineties a restaurant opened there called the People's Palace, seemingly in homage to the hall's democratic principles, but actually priced out of many people's range. Here Labour held its famous victory party in 1997, singing Things Can Only Get Better.

The next 10 years were perfectly encapsulated in that moment - the look of socialism but not the reality. Also a blithe optimism and faith in the future, which, not to be churlish, was badly needed after the Major years.

Back in the Forties the hall crystallised ideals nurtured in the Thirties and given force by the war. It is an emblem of all those things that had been attacked by the Nazis, but had triumphed. It was created by a small group of architects, the oldest of them 42, who included Peter Moro, a German-Jewish refugee who had been interned by the British at the outset of the war as an enemy alien. Despite or because of his experience it embodies an unshakeable belief in art, music, science, knowledge, freedom and hope.

This belief is present in the loving detail of the door handles and stair balustrades, and in the careful use of materials, scarce due to post-war shortages, such as bronze, elm, copper, walnut, teak and a fossil-rich Derbyshire stone. It is a faith in the new, discernible in the motif of the carpets, inspired by the patterns music makes on an oscilloscope, and in the design by the young Robin Day, now in his nineties, of the 3,000 seats of the auditorium.

It is also in the openness of the foyer, and in its architects' idea that it should be like a three-dimensional painting. The building was to have no grand entrance but four separate ways in, and no separation of the foyers for the audience according to how much they had paid.

Leslie Martin, one of the leaders of the team, collected the abstract art of Ben Nicholson, which inspired planes of colour that have now been restored. The Royal Festival Hall was highminded and a touch paternalistic, at one with the old BBC idea that the culture that gave pleasure to the highly educated should simply be made available to all, with the cheque being paid by the taxpayer.

Such simple idealism now seems remote. Culture has to prove itself in the market. It has to attract and satisfy sponsors and exploit opportunities for retail and merchandising. The confidence with which it was built so fast by a small and inexperienced team has also gone.

Back then young men had recently commanded ships and battalions on which the future of Europe had depended, and huge temporary harbours were erected in days off the Normandy beaches, so building a concert hall would not have seemed such a big deal.

Now it takes teams of consultants and specialist subcontractors to refurbish what was built so blithely. It cost more than 50 times as much as it took to build, and took 15 years from first inception to completion, rather than three. It has taken more work to re-make the auditorium, to take every element apart, modify them in the interests of acoustics, and put them in with as a little visible difference as possible, as it did to build it in the first place.

This is not to say that 1951 was all good and that 2007 is all bad. The self-belief of the original architects did, lest we forget, bequeath an auditorium with notoriously poor acoustics, against which musicians have struggled for all its working life. This is somewhat fundamental for a concert hall.

Now all those consultants and contractors and all that money have produced what is claimed to be, acoustically, one of the best halls in the world. The test will be at the 11 June opening gala, when four orchestras play to the public.

In the years following 1951 the theory that educated gentlemen knew what was good for everyone else led to some famous failures, in architecture and elsewhere. The current, less certain world has its advantages. But there is still something marvellous about that distant time.

Allies and Morrison has brought something of it back. It has opened up windows and relocated offices that were clogging up the hall into a new building alongside. It has thrown some of the retail moneychangers out of the cultural temple, even if some of these have relocated in the form of chain restaurants - Giraffe, Eat - just outside the building.

After two decades of visions and grand plans for the South Bank what has actually been achieved is a discreet and careful refurbishment, but it is one that has returned an unrepeatable building to health.

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It's a winner: the reborn festival hall

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