The Royal Opera House

The name, and what actually changed

Two names now run in parallel, by design, and a good deal of writing has collapsed them into one. The organisation became Royal Ballet and Opera, announced on 30 April 2024 and taking effect from the start of the 2024/25 season that September; a new visual identity followed with the 2025/26 season launch in April 2025. The building remains the Royal Opera House. That is not survival by habit — it is the organisation's own current usage, in the names of its tours, the title of its access guide and the address it gives for its restaurant.

The resident companies did not change their names either: they are The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. Nor did the legal name: Companies House and the Charity Commission both still register the body as the Royal Opera House Covent Garden Foundation, and the organisation's own website footer uses it, even though its annual report presents the legal name as having changed. Where an organisation's report and the statutory register disagree, the register governs.

The reason given for the change was that the two companies had shared one roof since 1946 and that the ballet deserved equal prominence, with a commercial case about audiences who did not know the ballet was there. The reception in parts of the opera press was hostile. The error to watch for is the claim that the theatre itself was renamed, which was printed by at least one reputable broadcaster in April 2024 and has been copied ever since.

Three buildings, two fires

The institution dates from 1732 and the building does not, which is the most common mistake made about it. There have been three theatres on the site.

The first opened on 7 December 1732 as the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, built by Edward Shepherd — credited as its designer by the institution, though the scholarly record names him only as the man who contracted to build it. It occupied part of the present site and was destroyed by fire on 20 September 1808.

The second was Robert Smirke's, built in ten months and opened on 18 September 1809 — an opening night that began the Old Price Riots. It was destroyed by fire on 5 March 1856.

The third is the building that stands. It is by Edward Middleton Barry — not Charles Barry, his father, which is the most frequent attribution error attached to it, though the family connection is worth knowing: E. M. Barry is the architect who finished the Palace of Westminster after his father died. It was built in 1857 and 1858 and opened on 15 May 1858 with Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots.

Something of the second theatre did survive. Flaxman's bas-reliefs and Rossi's statues of Melpomene and Thalia were salvaged from Smirke's building and reused on the present Bow Street front, so the facade carries fabric older than the house behind it.

Three buildings is the institution's own count and it understates the number of auditoria, since the interior was remodelled in 1782 and reconstructed in 1792 inside the first shell, and rebuilt again in 1847 inside Smirke's.

The house is Grade I listed, first listed on 9 January 1970, and the list entry is unusually precise about its limits. Protected are the 1858 exterior, entrance hall, Grand Staircase, Crush Room, auditorium and royal and Bedford suites, with their Victorian ironwork and decorative schemes — and the exteriors only of the west extension of 1979 to 1982 and the south extension and fly tower of 1996 to 2000. Expressly excluded are the interiors of both extensions, the interiors of the 2015 to 2018 works, which the entry calls not of special interest, and various modern fittings. The Bridge of Aspiration of 2003, which carries dancers across Floral Street to the Royal Ballet School, is not part of the listing at all.

The Floral Hall, which is mostly a replica

The glass hall beside the theatre is also E. M. Barry's, built in 1858 and 1859 and opened in 1860, with ironwork from the Regent's Canal Ironworks. The opera house put it up as a flower market, and it became part of Covent Garden Market in 1887.

What is there now is not what burned. A fire in 1956 wrecked it, and the glass dome and barrel roof were dismantled and not rebuilt — a plain pitched roof went on instead. In the redevelopment of 1996 to 2000 the hall was taken apart again: the south portico and four bays were removed to Borough Market, where they stand today and are listed in their own right, and the remainder was re-erected with a replica of the original barrel vault. So the sweep of glass overhead is twenty-five years old, not a hundred and sixty, and copy describing it as Barry's original Victorian structure is wrong in a way that matters.

It is separately listed, Grade II, and is not covered by the Grade I entry for the theatre — another detail most accounts get wrong. Its present name is the Paul Hamlyn Hall, after a benefactor, rather than anything Barry would have recognised.

The redevelopment of the 1990s, and the row about it

The house closed in July 1997 and reopened on 1 December 1999, to a scheme by Dixon Jones with Building Design Partnership — a joint credit, which the listing records and which single-architect accounts drop. The budget was £213 million, of which the Arts Council awarded £78.5 million of National Lottery money in 1995: a little over a third, not the whole, though it is often described as though the lottery paid for the building.

It was politically explosive, and the reasons are worth stating because they shaped the institution's subsequent behaviour. A Commons select committee inquiry was hostile and its report harshly critical; the chairman resigned along with most of the board; a fly-on-the-wall television documentary had already done considerable damage; and a decision to bar upper-circle ticket holders from the lower foyers at intervals gave the elitism charge a concrete form. While the works ran, the Royal Ballet decamped to Hammersmith and the Royal Opera moved between the Barbican and the Shaftesbury.

What the money bought was a new stagehouse and fly tower, the Floral Hall restored and raised, a second auditorium, rehearsal space and shops, and a re-raked stalls. Barry's auditorium was kept.

Open Up, and going in without a ticket

The change that matters most to anyone not holding a ticket was finished in September 2018. Open Up, by Stanton Williams, cost £50.7 million — not the thirty-seven million that circulates, which could not be traced to anything — and took nearly three years during which all 996 scheduled performances went ahead without a cancellation. There is no evidence that lottery money was involved; that was the earlier project.

It redesigned both entrances, on the piazza and on Bow Street, added a projecting glazed pavilion beneath the Floral Hall, enlarged the foyer by about half, put in a café and a bigger shop, made a double-height lower lobby to serve as the Linbury's own entrance, and added an upper-floor bar and a restaurant. The nineteenth-century building, the main auditorium included, was largely untouched: almost all of the work fell on the 1990s extension.

The result is that the building is open to anyone, with no ticket, and the organisation says so plainly. Cicoria and Bar Cicoria, on the fifth floor overlooking the piazza, are open to all and welcome walk-ins — the bar a heated, covered terrace wrapping round the building — from noon to eleven, Monday to Saturday, and noon to nine on Sunday. Some of the other eating places are for ticket holders only, from two hours before a performance until the end of the last interval, and the organisation does not publish which, so that is worth asking at the door. Its general opening time is given on a page carrying no date and is better checked than relied on.

The Linbury Theatre, the second auditorium, was rebuilt rather than refurbished in the same works: the previous black-box studio of 1999 is gone, and a horseshoe auditorium was built inside the retained concrete shell, reconfigurable to thrust, end-on, traverse, in the round or a flat floor, with seating elevators and a variable orchestra pit. It reopened in January 2019. Its capacity is given as four hundred by the project team and three hundred and fifty on the organisation's own venue-hire pages, which is unresolved; the likeliest explanation is that one is a hire configuration and the other the maximum, but neither source says so. It has three levels and six wheelchair spaces, two on each.

The auditorium, and getting into it

The main auditorium has five levels, not the four tiers usually quoted: stalls, stalls circle, Donald Gordon Grand Tier, balcony and amphitheatre.

Its capacity is a trap. Figures of 2,256 and 2,268 are both in circulation and stated flatly, and the organisation publishes none of them — so any source giving a single official-sounding number is wrong by that fact alone. About two and a quarter thousand is as far as it is safe to go.

On access: the Bow Street entrance is step-free and the piazza entrance step-free by ramp, and there are wheelchair spaces in the Grand Tier, the balcony and the amphitheatre, reached by lift. There are no lifts to the orchestra stalls. Four strands of adapted performance run — sensory adapted, relaxed environment, audio described and interpreted in British Sign Language — and at relaxed performances the lights never go fully out, visitors may bring their own food and drink, and phones may be used on silent. There is an Access scheme to join, and Touch Tours, which let members handle sets and props before a performance, are for its members.

Three practical points that catch people out. There is no dress code for regular performances, though galas may have one. Latecomers are not admitted: the auditorium opens half an hour before the curtain, and anyone who misses it may wait up to ninety minutes to be let in. And the building is cashless.

Tours

There are a great many, and they are not interchangeable: behind the scenes, architecture, opera, the making of a production, a women's history of the house, exhibition tours, an on-stage tour, a ballet tour with tea, and versions for schools and for younger visitors, with private tours available in other languages. Public tours run in English only and last sixty to seventy-five minutes.

The constraints are worth knowing in advance. Twelve and over is the recommendation, under-fourteens must be accompanied, and under-fives are not admitted at all, pushchairs included. Latecomers are not admitted. And because this is a working theatre, the route changes and access to the main auditorium is not guaranteed — which is the thing most people are hoping to see. Tours also run at the craft workshops in Thurrock, not only at Covent Garden.

Who runs it, and the two music directors

The structural point almost every account gets wrong is that there are two music directors, one for each company. Jakub Hrůša became Music Director of The Royal Opera on 11 August 2025, succeeding Antonio Pappano, who is now Conductor Laureate. Koen Kessels is Music Director of The Royal Ballet and remains in post. Hrůša did not replace Kessels.

Sir Alex Beard has been Chief Executive since September 2013, and no successor has been announced. Oliver Mears has been Director of Opera since March 2017, with Netia Jones as Associate Director; Kevin O'Hare directs The Royal Ballet, and Sir Wayne McGregor has been its Resident Choreographer since 2006. The King is Patron.

Money, the cinema season and tickets for the young

Arts Council England funding continues — a grant of £23.1 million in 2024/25, after a cut of about nine per cent in the 2023 to 2026 settlement. The national portfolio that grant sits in was extended to 31 March 2027, with a further extension reported but not confirmed, so the next settlement is the organisation's largest open question. Against income of about £182 million in 2024/25, it reported 629,000 tickets booked, around half of them by people new to the organisation, and about a million people through the doors.

The cinema season is the main way most of its audience sees it: the 2026/27 season announced in May 2026 sends eleven productions, six opera and five ballet, to more than 1,500 cinemas in fifty countries.

Young RBO, for sixteen to twenty-five-year-olds, is free to join and is the one scheme worth knowing about. It gives subsidised main-stage tickets from Monday to Thursday, free access to the streaming platform and more than a hundred productions on it, priority booking a day ahead of general sale, and two dedicated evenings a season with pre-show tours. Friday to Sunday performances, the Linbury and certain long runs are excluded. It began as Young ROH in August 2021, and 22,000 of its members bought a subsidised ticket in 2024/25. There is no separate scheme for first-time attenders, despite claims to the contrary, and nothing offers free tickets to the general public.

What changed in 2026

Three things a current account should carry. In June 2026 the organisation announced sixty-four post cuts from a staff of 1,169, about five per cent, with nine compulsory redundancies and a greater reliance on volunteers for front-of-house work — so the staffing a visitor meets is in flux. In April 2026 it received £5 million from the government's Arts Everywhere Fund. And at the Spring Gala on 14 May 2026 new main-stage curtains were unveiled bearing the cipher of King Charles III, made with the Royal School of Needlework, replacing curtains carrying Elizabeth II's cipher that had hung for twenty-seven years.

Behind all of it is the fabric. The organisation's own reporting now puts the need at about £60 million over three years and £250 million over the decade, the first figure described as what it takes simply to keep the building open and working, with the Royal Ballet's centenary in 2031 and the house's tercentenary in 2032 as the targets.

Finding it

The two public entrances are on Bow Street and on the Covent Garden piazza, and the nearest station is Covent Garden, though Leicester Square and Charing Cross are both short walks and considerably less crowded.