Albertopolis: a cultural forum for imperial London

Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha the spouse of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was instrumental in organising the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851. To this end a large exhibition hall was erected: the Crystal Palace. The international exhibition was a phenomenal success and in the late 1980s Exhibition Road was constructed to commemorate the event. This new road extended southwards from the West Carriage Drive that separates Kensington Gardens from Hyde Park and cut through Kensington Gore, an area of fields and market gardens south of Kensington Gardens.

Prince Albert had a vision of an area devoted to the arts and sciences to be built near the Crystal Palace. The huge profits from the Great Exhibition made this vision much easier to realise. The new cultural forum of ‘Albertopolis’, as it was dubbed, was based on the Fredericianum in Berlin an eighteenth century cultural forum loosely modelled after classical examples. The Kensington Gore in what is now South Kensington was chosen as the site for its proximity to the exhibition grounds on the edge of Hyde Park. Albert also made the first sketches with a symmetrical arrangement of several large buildings and spacious squares between two more or less parallel roads: Exhibition Road and Queens gate. As Queens Gate was being laid out the plans were augmented by including two roads than compartmented the terrain in three more or less equally sized areas.

Building work on the cultural forum started east of Exhibition Road with the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum or V&A stands here) in 1852. The rest of Albertopolis was to serve as exhibition grounds with large halls for the 1862 and 1886 international exhibitions. Almost all the exhibition buildings have now vanished, the institutions that replaced them remain. The present Albertopolis is thus the second incarnation of this cultural forum.

Between 1868-73 the present-day Henry Cole Wing of the V&A was built after designs by Henry Scott with Henry Cole and Richard Redgrave as the School of Naval Architects. Henry Cole was the first director of the South Kensington Museum and a driving force behind the Great Exhibition. In 1978 the building was annexed by the V&A. and the name was changed. Before that the building had been occupied by the Science School and by Imperial College.

The strong central axis of Albertopolis was focussed on the Albert Memorial on the edge of Kensington Gardens. This freestanding memorial was erected between 1863-72 by Sir George Gilbert Scott in atypical amalgamation of stylistic elements to form a rather copious monument. Albert had died in 1861 and thus never saw the completion of his dream of an area devoted to art, science and architecture.

The Albert Hall was built as a Hall of the Arts and Sciences, between 1867-71 after designs by  Francis Fowke and H. Y. D. Scott. The building is an elliptical, drum-shaped auditorium with a circumference of 225 metres, topped with a vast dome. The central axis of the building is aligned with the Albert Memorial north of Kensington Road. It recalls Gottfried Sempers Dresden Opera (built 1837-41) in style.

By the 1870s Kensington was almost fully developed, apart from the area immediately around the Albert Hall. Lowther Lodge (1873) was originally planned as a generously proportioned town house for William Lowther MP. It was conceived as a country mansion,  set back behind an entrance court on the Hyde Park front. Since 1911 Lowther Lodge has been the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society.

The Royal College of Organists (H. H. Cole, 1876) was built as the National Training School for Music and later became specifically devoted to organists. It was designed by Henry Cole’s son and is quite unique in appearance with the cream, pale blue and maroon sgraffito decoration.  The Jamaican High Commission by J. J. Stevenson on 29 Exhibition Road were completed in the same year in a fashionable style that loosely draws on English and Dutch buildings of about 1700. The whole is styled as a double house.

The so-called Albert Hall Mansions (Richard Norman Shaw, 1879) are luxurious red-brick apartments also executed in the new ‘Queen Anne’ style that was based on English and Dutch architecture of the early 18th century. As London had no tradition of apartment blocks for the middle and upper classes, Shaw took his floor plans from French examples. Several blocks comprise Albert Hall Mansions and together they wrap around the Albert Hall to appear like a fragment of a European city set down in London.

The 85-metre high Queen’s Tower on the central axis is the last remaining part of the magnificent Imperial Institute (T. E. Colcutt, 1887-93) that was founded as an outcome of the Colonial Exhibition of 1886. Despite the quality of Colcutt’s building in an expressive Renaissance revival style, the Institute was never successful and it was demolished in the 1950s and 1960s to make way for Imperial College.

Originating from collections within the British Museum, Natural History Museum, a landmark Alfred Waterhouse building, was opened in 1881. It was part of the British Museum until 1963 and was officially known as British Museum (Natural History) until 1992. The buildings large central hall (with the skeleton of a dinosaur) is positioned on the central axis of Albertopolis. It later incorporated the Geological Museum. The Darwin Centre is a more recent addition, partly designed as a modern facility for storing the valuable collections.

The Royal College of Music, designed by Sir Arthur Blomfield was built between 1889-94 on the central axis of Albertopolis and introduces a French baronial element into the eclectic mix of architecture styles. The Baroque revival building is still in use. The facade in red brick echoes the Albert Hall opposite and was picked up again by R. J. Worley for Albert Court, the neighbouring tall block of apartments (1894–1900).

The Royal School of Mines (Aston Webb, 1909-13) stands next to the Royal College of Music. It was designed in a Classical revival style with an over-scale niche as the entrance containing a huge monument to Alfred Beit and Julius Wernher.  Aston Webb was also responsible for the Cromwell Road front of the V&A built around 1907.

On 26 June 1909 the Science Museum became an independent entity from the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Science Museum's present quarters, designed by Sir Richard Allison, were opened in stages over the period 1919–28. This building was known as the East Block. As the name suggests it was intended to be the first building of a much larger project, which was never realized. However, the Museum buildings were expanded over the following years.

Albertopolis comprises of several institutes and housing (light grey).De central axis starts at the Albert Memorial (1) and runs through the Albert Hall (2). Nearby are the Royal College of Organists (3), Imperial College Union Building (4), Holy Trinity Church (5), the Albert Hall Mansions (6), Lowther Lodge (7) and the Jamaican High Commission (8). The central axis continues through the Royal College of Music (10) flanked by the Royal School of Mines (9) and Albert Court (11). Behind these building stood the Imperial Institute (12). Across from a large public garden (now built over) stood stand the Church of Jesus Christ (13) an the Science Museum (14). Nearby we find the School of Naval Architects(15) and the V&A (16). On the other side of Exhibition Road we find the Geological Museum (17 and the Natural History Museum (18).