FEATURE
HELP US MAKE AN ENTRANCE As work begins on the Entrance Hall and Foyer Hall this summer, Upbeat traces the significant history of the gateway to our South Kensington campus, and reveals how you can support this new chapter of RCM history.
Fox made two important donations to the building project totalling £45,000, singlehandedly providing for most of the cost of the new RCM. His generous contribution meant that the construction of a handsome piece of architecture was now possible, and the Exhibition Commissioners reconsidered their offer. Ultimately, it was decided that a larger site on the newly created Prince Consort Road would be a more befitting home for the Royal College of Music, and in 1888 a Building Committee was formed to oversee the project. Plans for the new campus were ambitious. A letter from the Committee to HRH The Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) in early 1889 decreed that the new building ‘be of a character worthy of the site’. In March that year, HRH approved the appointment of architect Sir Arthur Blomfield to oversee this historic task.
In the 1850s Prince Albert bought a plot of land just south of Hyde Park, and he planned to fill it with museums and colleges dedicated to science and the arts. His vision for ‘Albertopolis’ – or South Kensington as it is better known today – had at its heart two objectives: access and excellence. Now, some 160 years later, the More Music: Reimagining the Royal College of Music Campaign is further building upon these two ideals. Our redesigned entrance will both reflect Albert’s original Victorian vision and support the pursuit of our exciting plans for the future: widening public access to the arts while delivering excellence. The Blomfield Building entrance is steeped in history that stretches back to the the late 1880s. The Royal College of Music (RCM), newly founded in 1882, was by the end of the decade beginning to outgrow its original home in Kensington Gore. In early 1887, the Exhibition Commissioners informally offered the College a site on the west side of Exhibition Road. This might have been where the RCM sits today, had the project not gained the attention of Yorkshire industrialist Samson Fox.
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UPBEAT SUMMER 2019
The Entrance Hall was one of the last sections to be completed. Blomfield, writing to the Committee on 8 June 1893, outlined some of the contractual provisions agreed for the space. The new RCM was to be divided into two halves with a separate entrance on each side of the general entrance for male and female pupils, as well as designated staircases and corridors. Visitors would enter the main entrance through a set of grand doors, furnished from oak to set them apart from the rest of the RCM doors, which were almost all sourced from Baltic lumber. A sum of £4 and 15 shillings was paid for ‘the name of the College and the date of its foundation in bronze letters on the frieze over the front’. The Entrance Hall was also to be distinguished by its elegant interior. Relatively little money was allocated to internal decoration in the rest of the building, but meeting minutes from December 1890 record that, having visited the new premises the previous month, Fox and Blomfield had decided upon marble fittings and an ornamental ceiling ‘at a cost not exceeding £1,000’. Importantly, Fox’s considerable contribution to the College was to be immortalised in an intricate mosaic, designed by Diespeker & Co and placed in the Entrance Hall floor.
