Royal Opera Arcade (London)

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The Royal Opera Arcade, designed by John Nash and completed in 1818, is Britain's original covered shopping arcade. It was built behind Haymarket Opera House, now the site of Her Majesty's Theatre, where the Phantom of the Opera has been playing for many years. Royal Opera Arcade is a peaceful place in the heart of London, with shops specialising in luxury items, and goods related to country living.

The Arcade is a covered walk some twelve feet wide, parallel with the Haymarket and extending between Pall Mall and Charles II Street. On its west side are eighteen (originally nineteen) small shops, each with a basement and a mezzanine room. The arcade is likewise composed of eighteen square bays, each ceiled with a simple groined vault rising to a circular skylight, the bays being separated by plain arch-soffits rising from plain-shafted Doric pilasters. Each shop has a display window, quadrant-curved at each end to bring it forward from the wall face, with a simply panelled stallboard, a window divided into large panes by delicately moulded glazing-bars, and a plain fascia below the cornice. The shop door on the right is similarly treated but does not project. In the tympanum above each shop-front is a lunette window, framed with a moulded archivolt and divided into three lights. The wall and ceiling surfaces, and the architectural ornaments, are in stucco, now uniformly painted but originally frescoed to represent Bath stone. There was an arcade of shops leading to the Parthenon however it is no longer standing. The Royal Opera Arcade was completed in 1818, making it undoubtedly London’s oldest shopping arcade. Lord George Cavendish’s Burlington Arcade built in 1818-1819 was completed a year after The Royal Opera Arcade, its planning also followed that of Nash and his ‘tasteful pupil’ George Repton’s Arcade. Indeed, Thomas Leverton and John Fordyce had both promoted the provision of an arcade on the west side of the theatre to improve and complete the ensemble since the latter’s death in 1795 (Survey of London; Vol. XXIX). The arcade is built on the late 18th Century/ early 19th Century model of ‘Passages’ and ‘Galleries’.

The Arcade has been fortunate to survive devastating fires (1789 and 1867) and a subsequent demolition of the Opera House site (1890) forcing the Theatre to be rebuilt several times and making the arcade of shops the oldest part of the Opera House complex.
The Arcade is a covered walk some twelve feet wide, parallel with the Haymarket and extending between Pall Mall and Charles II Street. On its west side are eighteen (originally nineteen) small shops, each with a basement and a mezzanine room. The arcade is likewise composed of eighteen square bays, each ceiled with a simple groined vault rising to a circular skylight, the bays being separated by plain arch-soffits rising from plain-shafted Doric pilasters. Each shop has a display window, quadrant-curved at each end to bring it forward from the wall face, with a simply panelled stallboard, a window divided into large panes by delicately moulded glazing-bars, and a plain fascia below the cornice. The shop door on the right is similarly treated but does not project. In the tympanum above each shop-front is a lunette window, framed with a moulded archivolt and divided into three lights. The wall and ceiling surfaces, and the architectural ornaments, are in stucco, now uniformly painted but originally frescoed to represent Bath stone.

St James’s and Pall Mall
Pall Mall takes its name from the game ‘palle-maille’, a cross between croquet and golf, that was played here in the early-17th century. For over 150 years this dignified street has been at the heart of London’s clubland. The clubs evolved from the 17th century coffee houses as meeting places where gentlemen could find refuge from their womenfolk. However, most of the exclusive gentlemens’ clubs seen today date from the 19th century.

The club buildings represent the work of some of the most fashionable architects of the era. The colonnaded United Services Club was built by John Nash in 1827, this was the Duke of Wellington’s favourite club and now houses the Institute of Directors. Facing it, on the other side of Waterloo Place, is the Athenaeum, designed by Decimus Burton in 1830, and has long been the power house of the British establishment.

Beside it are two clubs built by Sir Charles Barry, architect of the Houses of Parliament, the Travellers’ Club and the Reform Club, spawned by the 1832 Reform Act. The RAC club, founded in 1897 is the most recent, and least class-conscious, of the clubs.

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