Watch: Building London's Royal Festival Hall

The Royal Festival Hall has been the cornerstone of London's South Bank since it opened in 1951.

The hall was built as part of that year's Festival of Britain and while the rest of the festival site was cleared away and redeveloped once it ended, the Royal Festival Hall has remained a mainstay ever since, hosting some of the most famous musicians in the world such as Louis Armstrong, the Bee Gees, Frank Sinatra and David Bowie.

We've gone back into the archives to 1949 and the day the foundation stone was laid by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, when he described the venue as somewhere "to give pleasure and refreshment of the soul to generations of Londoners yet unborn".

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