29th March: Royal Albert Hall opened

On this date in 1871 Queen Victoria opened the Royal Albert Hall. 10 things you may not know about the Royal Albert Hall:

1. Originally designed to hold up to 9,000 people, health and safety these days limit the number of people it can accommodate to 5,544.
2. The Royal Albert Hall is a registered charity.
3. It was originally to have been called The Central Hall of Arts and Sciences, but Queen Victoria changed the name to Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences when laying the foundation stone. This wasn't just down to her devotion to Albert - the concept of a facility for the arts on the site was originally his idea, and the site had been nicknamed "Albertopolis".
4. When the dome, which is 135ft (41m) high, was built, there were fears it might collapse when put in place. There was a trial run of erecting it, in Manchester, which was successful. The dome was taken apart and carried back to London by horse and cart. When it was finally in place and the supporting structures were removed, volunteers waited with baited breath in case the whole thing came tumbling down. It did drop five sixteenths of an inch, but I guess they could live with that.
5. The first concert was Arthur Sullivan's cantata, On Shore and Sea performed on 1 May 1871.
6. The Hall suffered only minor damage in World War II, because the German pilots used it as a landmark.
7. The Queen's Hall, the original venue for the Proms, was not so lucky. It was destroyed, and that is when the Albert Hall's most famous event was moved there.
8. The organ is the second largest pipe organ in the British Isles with 9,999 pipes in 147 stops. (The largest is the Grand Organ in Liverpool Cathedral which has 10,268 pipes.)
9. In 1956, Alfred Hitchcock filmed the climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much at the Hall.
10. From the start, the Hall was plagued by acoustic problems. There was a pronounced echo, and it used to be said that the Albert Hall was "the only place where a British composer could be sure of hearing his work twice". Engineers tried to solve the problem with canvas awnings and aluminium panels, but it wasn't until 1969 when they came up with a workable solution - large fibreglass discs suspended from the ceiling.