Royal Albert Hall Royal Albert Hall The Royal Albert Hall is a concert hall on the northern edge of South Kensington, London, which has held the Proms concerts annually each summer since 1941. It has a capacity of up to 5,272 seats. The Hall is a registered charity held in trust for the nation and receives no public or government funding. Since its opening by Queen Victoria in 1871, the world's leading artists from many performance genres have appeared on its stage and it has become one of the UK's most treasured and distinctive buildings. The location of some of the most notable
Royal Albert Hall having given its first performance as the Royal Albert Hall Choral Society on 8 May 1872. From 1876 it established the annual Good Friday performance of Handel's "Messiah". The BBC Sir Henry Wood Promenade Concerts, known as "The Proms", is a popular annual eight-week summer season of daily classical music concerts and other events at the Hall. In 1942, following the destruction of the Queen's Hall in an air raid, the Hall was chosen as the new venue for the proms. In 1944 with increased danger to the Hall, part of the proms were held in the Bedford Corn Exchange.