Reimagining the people’s palace
A building that deserves to be admired as an example of intelligent and sophisticated urban planning
This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Over the years, I have spent a great deal of time in the Royal Opera House — meeting friends for drinks in the Floral Hall and then finding our way to our seats in the auditorium. But very few people pay attention to, or comment on, its qualities as a work of modern architecture, in spite of the fact that it was a subject of almost continual public controversy from when its enlargement was first proposed in 1984 to when the new building opened in 1999 just in time for the Millennium.
In so far as it gets discussed, I have found that those who use it admire it, but architects disapprove of it because it involved the creation of a simplified version of Inigo Jones’ arcades to complete the piazza outside and the three façades are in different styles.
And yet it is surely precisely because the vast expansion of the building right in the middle of Covent Garden was able to accommodate itself to its surroundings and not dominate them that it deserves to be admired as an example of intelligent and sophisticated urban planning.
Jeremy Dixon was 45 when he and his wife Fenella won the competition to enlarge the Royal Opera House in 1984 jointly with Bill Jack of Building Design Partnership, against stiff competition from the other two finalists, Richard Rogers and Ted Cullinan.
Dixon had been trained at the Architectural Association and, after working briefly for Alison and Peter Smithson, was partly responsible for the design of Netherfield, one of the most uncompromising housing schemes done for the Milton Keynes Development Corporation in the early 1970s.
Like many of his generation, Dixon then became disillusioned with modernism whilst travelling round the country giving lectures about his work during the recession of the 1970s, particularly the ways that modernism treated cities and social housing.
In the late 1970s, he and Fenella were amongst the first architects to re-establish a relatively traditional street frontage in a group of houses they designed for St Mark’s Road, Kensington.
In 1984, the Board of the Royal Opera House launched a competition to redesign all the public facilities at Covent Garden, whilst retaining the original auditorium, designed by Edward Middleton Barry and first opened in 1858. Instead of doing it as a public competition with a conventional jury, they decided that the Board itself, under the chairmanship of Sir Claus Moser, would make the choice. Twenty-two architectural practices made presentations.
Jeremy Dixon had two great advantages. He had been using Covent Garden as a case study in his teaching at the Architectural Association and so already had an interest in retaining the urban character of an essentially small-scale neighbourhood with Inigo Jones’ 1620s piazza at its centre. He also is, and always has been, passionately interested in music.
In their competition entry for the Royal Opera House and all their subsequent designs, the Dixons were determined to disguise the huge mass required by opera productions, particularly the back-of-stage area which was expected to be six times the size of the stage in order to accommodate stage sets in between productions.
This part of the building was totally out of scale with its surroundings, so they set about making sure that the building integrated with the streets of the surrounding city. Encouraged by Léon Krier, they designed the arcade facing onto the Covent Garden Piazza in a way which was based on the Piazza d’Arme in Livorno.
It was planned to stitch together this part of the city following the departure of the fruit and vegetable market to Nine Elms, treating the building not as a stand-alone monument, as a modernist would, but as an act of urban reconstruction, a collage of different elements, now very fashionable.
Their first submission to the Westminster planning committee was made in 1986. At this stage, the development was to be paid for by building a new office development to the south, facing onto Russell Street.
Retaining the Floral Hall was not part of the original scheme. There followed long years of wrangling, trying to raise the necessary funds to build the scheme and quarrelling with the Covent Garden Community Association, who were bitterly opposed to it. Chairmen came and went. So did general directors.
In 1989, Jeremy Dixon joined forces with Edward Jones, a friend from their days at the Architectural Association who had similar interests in urban design.
They had worked together at Milton Keynes Development Corporation and on a plan for a new Northampton Town Hall, after which Jones taught at Cornell University, in Dublin and at the Royal College of Art and won a competition to design Mississauga City Hall outside Toronto. Together, they spent the next decade developing revised designs for the Opera House.
The funding for a new Royal Opera House became available with the establishment of the National Lottery in 1993. Jeremy Isaacs, the general director of the Royal Opera House, delivered the plans for a new Royal Opera House to the Arts Council by wheelbarrow. Work on the new building started in 1996. It opened in December 1999.
The redevelopment was a remarkable feat of patience and intelligent design, but the reason for its success is precisely because it feels as if it has always been there. The auditorium has. The Floral Hall was repurposed. And the rest of the gigantic project is disguised by a neo-classical arcade.
