Memories of The Royal Albert Hall to celebrate 150 years!

The Royal Albert Hall and we have worked on a number of projects over the years, and in 2017 we started brainstorming ideas for their 150th year in 2021. Peter Blake’s mural already celebrated the diversity of artists who have graced their stage, and we all agreed that showcasing the audiences would be the next step in celebrating the legacy of the Hall. Anyone who has been to an event at this iconic venue will have a story to tell, often accompanied by a photograph, some video or a ticket stub. We decided to build the Royal Albert Memories site to allow people to share those stories, bringing them all together in one place rather than just siloed on the various social media platforms.

Originally the plan was to simply present a body of “memories” of the hall as submitted by visitors online. The means of submission, and the manner of on-site presentation was very much open to discussion and it wasn’t long before 3B came up with some fun ideas.

We knew we wanted an easy way for the public to add content to the site, and for it to integrate social media as well as uploaded content easily. We needed to allow text and photos via upload, and anything else by pasting a link to a social object such as a Tweet or Instagram post for automatic embedding. We integrated embed.ly which offers over 700 social networks and external sites for hosting such assets.

We have huge experience in managing and presenting information from large and often ancient and unwieldy databases - a challenge we never shy from and this was no exception; a number of internal meetings led us to the conclusion that these memories needed to be aligned with a database of past events at the Hall.

Thankfully the Hall had just such a database - it already served the Hall’s archive pages on the site - but it was quite antiquated in its set up and needed a “deep clean” to render it usable for our purposes… but it was a great start!

Design was less of a challenge; the Hall has a well established and distinct set of brand guidelines that ensures the site we built sits comfortably within the family of satellite sites that orbit royalalberthall.com. Our main UX challenge was ensuring that site visitors could easily find where and how to browse memories and events and leave their own submissions, linked to the appropriate event.

The results are something we’re hugely proud of - and something that’s been ready for launch for some time, waiting until this year (2021) when the Hall can announce its plans to celebrate its 150th anniversary.