RSArchive: 250 years of RSA House

Summary

This piece celebrates the 250th anniversary of RSA House in London. The RSA was founded in 1754 and quickly outgrew its coffee house origins, moving to a purpose-built headquarters designed by Robert and James Adam and completed in 1774. This article discusses some of the significant features and history of RSA House, including its Great Room, which includes James Barry’s iconic murals and has hosted significant events such as early demonstrations of the telegraph and telephone. 

Reading time

Three minutes

RSA House first opened its doors in 1774. Since then the site has seen carousing, consciousness-raising and confidence deserting some of history’s most renowned orators. Today it remains a source of inspiration and refreshment.

From its foundation in Rawthmell’s Coffee House in 1754, the impact of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce accelerated at a phenomenal rate.  Outgrowing its coffee house origins and rented rooms, in 1770 the Society appealed for proposals for purpose-built premises. A response was received from the renowned architects Robert and James Adam, who offered to include a suitable headquarters for the Society in the design of their visionary neoclassical Adelphi development.

On 28 March 1772, Lord Romney, the Society’s President, duly laid the foundation stone. As the minutes report, the attendees proceeded to dine at the Adelphi Tavern where “the Remainder of the Day was spent with that Harmony and Good Humour which a Consciousness of promoting the Good of Mankind and of Society will never fail to inspire”. Just two years later, the Society opened its doors and it is the 250th anniversary of this that we commemorate with the RSA Open House Festival on 15 September. 

Art and progress

From the outset, the Society’s ambition to celebrate its prestige complemented that of its architects, as it determined that RSA House’s Great Room should be spectacularly decorated with “proper historical or allegorical pictures”. The result, eventually, was James Barry’s audacious ‘The Progress of Human Culture’, a series of six murals, created between 1777 and 1783 and described by the critic Andrew Graham-Dixon as Britain’s “answer to the Sistine Chapel”.

The Great Room has since staged many momentous events, including: William Fothergill Cooke’s demonstration of his two-needle electric telegraph; Francis Whishaw’s exploration of the properties of gutta percha, which led to the development of insulated underwater cables; Alexander Graham Bell’s early telephone demonstration; and the first public exhibition in England of the incandescent light bulb.

The aura of the organisation and the presence of its members could silence even seasoned speakers. Samuel Johnson, London’s foremost literary figure, confided that when endeavouring to speak, “All my flowers of oratory forsook me.” Oliver Goldsmith, poet, novelist, playwright and member of Johnson’s Literary Club, fared even worse, standing up only to be “obliged to sit down in confusion”.

Culture and conviviality

On paper, Goldsmith vividly captured the RSA’s values in his prescient poem ‘The Deserted Village’, which focuses on the devastating depopulation of Auburn, an idyllic rural village. It examines the forces behind this eviction at a time when poetry was a legitimate medium for economic analysis, soon to change decisively with the publication of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Goldsmith’s successor as a member of both the Society and Johnson’s Club.

Goldsmith’s Auburn may give an idealised depiction of rural life, but George Crabbe’s riposte, ‘The Village’, paints the tavern as an arena for drunkenness and brutality. Crabbe’s verse deprives the reader of any hope of improvement, whereas implicit in Goldsmith’s account is an aspiration that it might be reached through regeneration. This was proved possible 160 years later, when the RSA purchased the village of West Wycombe to save it from dereliction, then in 1953 restored the picturesque cottages and Castle Inn in Chiddingstone, Kent.

Full circle

Goldsmith died in 1774, the year the House opened, but his presence persists thanks to Barry’s portrait of him in the Elysium panel of the mural. Decades later, Crabbe would visit Wiltshire’s Bowood House, whose interiors were designed by Robert Adam. When its east wing was demolished in 1955–56, the RSA acquired its carved chimneypieces and doorways. These now feature around RSA House, notably in the Tavern Room, which incorporates part of the former Adelphi Tavern to which the founders of the House retired for refreshments on that momentous day back in 1772.

Indeed, in a circular act of regeneration and renewal attuned to the RSA’s Design for Life mission, RSA House will soon once again boast a bar for the refreshment of Fellows, guests and members of the public. So, in Goldsmith’s words, we will no longer need: “Imagination fondly stoop to trace/The parlour splendours of that festive place”.

The bar opens this autumn.

Richard Hale is the RSA’s Internal Communications Manager.

This article was first published in RSA Journal Issue 3 2024.