The Great Room at RSA House has undergone multiple refurbishments since it was originally designed by Scottish architects the Adam Brothers.

The room was given its current name in 1774 and has retained its original proportions. The ceiling cornice is an original Adam design, although most of the other decoration was added by Arthur Bolton in the 1920s. Additional redevelopments followed in 2011 and 2018.

The Great Room has been the main venue for members’ discussions, debates, and the presentation of awards and medals throughout the RSA's history. It contains James Barry’s paintings ‘The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture’ (painted between 1777-1801), as well as portraits of our first two presidents, Viscount Folkestone by Thomas Gainsborough and Lord Romney by Joshua Reynolds.

The Great Room was where most of the Society's business was discussed by members, especially before the 1840s, when it functioned as a direct democracy, with each member having an equal vote. It was thus the place where we decided to advertise premiums that encouraged particular industries in Britain’s colonies, some of which supported slavery. It was also the place where other members at other times advertised premiums that did the opposite, rewarding abolitionist causes. As a direct democracy in our first century, the Society reflected the priorities or prejudices of its members, which changed over time.

In the 1780s, in the paintings that adorn the Great Room’s walls, James Barry depicted an African slave among the representations of four continents bringing their wares to Father Thames. Barry showed him as an object of pity, evoking a similar symbolism to the medallions created by the potter Josiah Wedgwood, which asked "Am I not a Man and a Brother?". In Barry's follow-up prints of the paintings, the anti-slavery sentiment was made even more explicit.

That same decade saw William Wilberforce and Josiah Wedgwood elected to our membership, with Wilberforce also becoming a vice president. In the early 1800s, political radicals like William Tooke (later also a president of the Society) gifted various abolitionist tracts to our library.