The expanded and renovated Royal Opera House occupies an entire urban block; it also encloses and repairs London’s first square. The significance of the project can thus be described first in terms of urban design and second as a theatre modernisation. It establishes a conventional urban hierarchy between the formal regularity of Covent Garden Piazza and the greater particularity of the surrounding streets. Streets with shops are an important element of urban continuity. The location of the stage at first-floor level allows for almost continuous shopping frontages across the scheme, linking the surrounding streets to the new piazza arcades.
In addition, a pedestrian mid-block connection between Bow Street and the piazza re-establishing an entrance that existed in the various theatres built on the site since 1732 and, more importantly, draws the theatre and its foyers into the life of the city. From this link the pedestrian is made aware of the Floral Hall and escalators above as a series of connected vertical foyers. Not unlike the nineteenth-century arcade, the public can pass through the block, buy tickets and enter the theatre.
The conventional distinction between street and square relates the scheme to the historical order of the surrounding city. The complex allows for various styles to develop simultaneously leading to an urban collage – neoclassical arcade on the piazza, modern street facades, and reconstruction of historic elements.
Members of the audience ascending the escalator rise above the Floral Hall roof before emerging back in the building, looking into the vault of the Floral Hall itself, or proceed onto the open loggia overlooking Covent Garden Piazza. The flytower and stage is a new construction built as a steel frame behind the retained historical facade to Floral Street. To the rear and side of the stage, a single unobstructed three-storey volume extends from Russell Street to Floral Street, with the get-in located on Bow Street.
The renovated Floral Hall, which forms the main foyer, can hold a large proportion of the audience. The nineteenth-century iron-and-glass structure was raised on a plinth. The hall is located on the south side of the auditorium, an unusual situation in that the foyer is asymmetrical to the axis of the auditorium. The Floral Hall thus becomes a building in its own right.
Vertical circulation plays an important part in the public circulation of the theatre. An escalator goes directly from the Floral Hall to amphitheatre level, where a bar looks back into the Floral Hall. The aim is to encourage the audience to move up as well as down during intervals, reversing the sense of social hierarchy.
The roofscape, like the external elevations, is a free composition. A new ground level has been created, marked by the loggia. On this are separately expressed ballet studios, flytower, rooftop studio areas and core towers, a rooftop village of activities and terraces.
Behind the scenes the building houses almost every conceivable form of employment, from people making and crafting things to engineering, stage assembly, finance, administration and management, alongside opera, dance and music activities – a miniature city within the city.
With its own terrace and views across Westminster, the canteen has a vital function in the ROH community of bringing together the various people who might not normally meet.
The arcade building, a principal frontage, houses important rooms. On the first floor are the main dressing rooms. On the second are management areas. Corridors around the stage have windows overlooking the vast stage spaces, giving a sense of location and allowing people to see what is happening on stage.