Royal Albert Hall archive preserved in £1m project

The Royal Albert Hall's archive has been saved from flooding and preserved in a £1m rescue operation.

The South Kensington venue's collection includes a trumpet from the opening ceremony 152 years ago and a programme designed by Pablo Picasso.

The archive spans the venue's history since its inception in the 1850s and consists of tens of thousands of items.

Chief executive James Ainscough said the collection brought "extraordinary events to life".

"This famous building has been a crucible of debate, a place of cultural and social transformation, and a prism through which to see a changing Britain," he said.

"No other venue on earth has played host to the Suffragettes, Albert Einstein and Muhammed Ali, as well as Ella Fitzgerald, The Beatles and Adele."

The archive had been stored in four different locations across the building, with the basement store repeatedly flooding and threatening to destroy some of the artefacts.

The collection is now housed in a fireproof climate-controlled studio in the building with a new reading room, and is open to historians, researchers and the public by appointment.

It will allow the Royal Albert Hall's archivists to conduct tours of its contents for the first time.

Also part of the collection is a ceremonial broom used during the Grand Sumo Tournament in 1991 - the first and only time the sport had been staged outside Japan in its 1,500-year history.

There is also a programme from the first sci-fi convention in the UK, in 1891, and a souvenir book from the Shakespeare Ball in 1911.

Dr Gerald Macaura's vibrating Pulsoconn, which was shown at the venue in the 1910s, is also part of the archive.

He claimed it could cure gout, rheumatism and "women's diseases" before he was unmasked as a fraud by medical students.

The Royal Albert Hall archivists are working to track down 40 notable items missing from its collection.

These include the silver trowel used by Queen Victoria to lay the building's first brick in May 1867.

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