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Description
Southbank Centre's wide-ranging programme of classical and world music, rock and pop, jazz, dance, literature and the visual arts attracts the most diverse audience of any UK venue.
Southbank Centre consists of Royal Festival Hall (newly reopened after its two-year transformation), The Hayward, Queen Elizabeth Hall (containing the Purcell Room), and The Saison Poetry Library. Southbank Centre also manages the Arts Council Collection and organises the National Touring Exhibition programme in venues throughout the UK.
Situated on the south bank of the River Thames next to the popular BA London Eye, Southbank Centre is at the heart of an arts quarter stretching from the Royal National Theatre and BFI Southbank to Tate Modern and Shakespeare's Globe.
Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road
London SE1 8XX
UK
Ticket Office: +44 (0)871 663 2500
History
Southbank Centre grew out of the Festival of Britain's flagship exhibition held on the south bank of the Thames in London in 1951. The Royal Festival Hall was designed and built to ensure it opened at the same time. After years of bombing and rationing, the South Bank Exhibition was an unprecedented colourful extravaganza, filled with new technology, art and design. The Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room were built in 1967 and The Hayward opened in 1968. It was with the Greater London Council's ambitious open foyer programme of 1983 that the site really came alive. It was through this period in the 1980s that the site started to be thought of as one place, now called Southbank Centre.
Southbank Centre is the largest, single run, arts centre in the world, with a long history of attracting pioneers in all forms of the arts.
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