Proms and the Park: Between Two Worlds
From the intensity of London's Royal Albert Hall to the tranquillity of Hyde Park, Alice Rickards, violinist with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, offers her reflections on nature and climate change in musical programming, sustainable practice, and the experience of performing at one of the world's most iconic concert venues.
It’s probably my roots, formed Down Under, that mean I unfurl and come to life in the British summertime. But once out of my winter shell, I know it’s time to wear many faces and not just the sunburnt one. It’s festival time!
While many folk are down tooling, wearing shorts, licking ice cream and sipping pints on sunny corners, we musicians are climbing into performance blacks in the bowels of the Royal Albert Hall. Night after night, a conveyor belt of sound vibrates through the 300,000 pairs of ears that travel to Albertopolis for the eight weeks of the BBC Proms, and those of us who belong to the BBC Performing Groups are busy as bees in a hive.
Prince Albert, the mastermind behind the 1851 Great Exhibition—showcasing innovation to around six million people—used the profits of the enterprise to create a central cultural hub in London, with areas designated to examine and celebrate all things natural and man-made. The Victorians benefitted from an industrial age of development, and the Royal Albert Hall became a jewel in the Queen’s crown, now home to the BBC Proms.
As a violinist in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Proms period is intensive. Our fingers fly through millions of notes, and symphonic works are chiselled into living structures in very short periods of time. Industrial music-making linked to an industrial past? As orchestral musicians, we refer to our work as “the notes factory” but there is so much more to the story. You’d have to step under the wrought iron dome yourself to find out. Every night is different and fleeting. Extraordinary, unexpected moments happen. The programming constantly evolves to reflect our world: where we have come from, where we are, and where we might be going.
Prom is short for promenade concert, a term which originally referred to outdoor concerts in London’s pleasure gardens, where the audience was free to stroll while the orchestra played. In the context of the BBC Proms, “promming” refers to the cheaper standing areas inside the Hall, where those who have queued around the circumference for tickets are packed cheek to jowl. And yes, once inside, it really is intense down there.
Like a tiered Victoria sponge, the Royal Albert Hall begins with the Arena level of promenaders, eagerly elbowing themselves to the front of the stage, so close you can feel their breath on your ankle. Above that, vast, multi-layered seating rises upward until you reach the Gallery, where more relaxed listeners can lie down, have a snooze, and let the sound drift up to them.
So much planning has gone into this moment when the music is gifted. Programming choices are made, artists selected, and careful consideration of how orchestras and instruments travel to London, increasingly with sustainability in mind. Then comes rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal—building in intensity until the dress rehearsal, when the pressure of expectation can make people pop.
Albertopolis, the cultural legacy of Prince Albert, has been described as an urban heat island. A high volume of traffic navigating a dense cluster of cultural buildings can significantly increase local temperatures, sometimes by several degrees. Add a hundred highly strung musicians into the mix, and then you’re cookin’.
After rehearsal, we risk life and limb crossing Kensington Gore, then scurry off to hide in the shadows among Hyde Park’s thousands of trees. Saved by the cooling effects of its ecosystem, hypnotised by its green bathing, a cold plunge in the Serpentine, a downward dog beneath a London plane tree, a calming inhale among the lungs of the city. Grounded. Safe. Foot on home base.
Growing up in the 1980s, climate change wasn’t on my radar. In Australia we had plenty of drought, but it was seen as part of the natural rhythm. When I moved to the UK in 2003, I thought, yep, it definitely is a green and pleasant land! But my eyes are open now. On recent Proms trips, Hyde Park has changed over the twenty years I’ve known it: biscuity-coloured grasses, brown leaves crunching underfoot, tree roots baked into dusty earth.
Musicians find friends and family in the vast savannah of the park, or perch on steps beneath Albert’s gilded gaze. Picnics and stories are shared, pre-concert energy humming quietly beneath the surface. A musician who can’t contain it might run back to the security of the Hall, get dressed, unpack their instrument and settle on the starting blocks. Others amble over, calm and self-assured.
From the downbeat, we are all on the same page, feelers out, connected to each other like a vast mycelium network. We note cues, trust signals, become one dynamic organism carried to the final note. Then, with civilian clothes back on, we emerge from underground into the night, dashing to our watering holes for last orders while bats swoop across the park, feasting on insects.
Facing the heat of performance, one learns resilience, constantly adapting to pressure, time, and energy. We all want the Proms to succeed and to continue as a live event, not as a memory of what once was. Because it tells us a story in a language we all understand. It revives places and emotions, bringing them back to life in a single moment. The Hall’s design points us inward, like skittles arranged in the round, compelling us to face one another and share the experience.
Which brings us back to this age of invention. How remarkable that such a grand hall could be built at all. But the methods of that time, while propelling humanity forward, have also left us with consequences we cannot simply undo. Proms performances during heatwaves have created an oven-like effect inside the Hall. In 2013, a three-hour performance of Wagner’s Das Rheingold was described by one audience member as “as hot as Hades”, with outside temperatures reaching 33.5°C, and performers onstage in tails and ties.
In response, the Royal Albert Hall has adapted over time, retrofitting the Victorian building with more energy-efficient ventilation and climate control systems. This improvement has prevented the Hall from becoming a modern-day Valhalla for musicians, fortunate for the vegans among us.
But dwarfs and river maidens aside, performances like the Ring Cycle exemplify the purpose of the Proms: to showcase world-class music-making, much as the Great Exhibition once showcased innovation. And the programming continues to do just that, acting as a magnetic beacon, drawing the outside world into its chamber.
The 2022 Earth Prom was a memorable performance for me as a violinist with the BBC SSO, featuring breathtaking Natural History Unit footage and an appearance from composer Hans Zimmer (“I love you all!” he declared to a cheering audience). In complete contrast was Jennifer Walshe’s The Site of an Investigation, described as “a massive, multilayered symphonic deep-dive into social media, algorithm madness, streaming playlists and micropollutants—all in search of a very personal path into the open.”
Under Henry Wood’s nose, percussionists built towers of single-use plastic, only to knock them down at the climax. An enormous toy giraffe was wrapped in suffocating plastic and placed on a pedestal at the back of the orchestra. (It survived, and has been put to pasture in the BBC SSO management office.)
In September 2026, the BBC SSO steps into a very different landscape in Mahler’s What the Wild Flowers Tell Me, inspired by the blooms surrounding his Alpine composing hut.
Perhaps inspiration for this could be gained pre-performance in the rewilded meadows of Hyde Park, where biodiversity is being rebuilt as part of a climate resilience strategy. Looking ahead, there are even ideas for a rooftop garden across the road at the Royal Albert Hall, which could potentially reduce the building’s temperature.
I can’t wait for that. To climb out of the depths and into the light, to look out over Prince Albert’s legacy and reflect on how far we’ve come, and where we go next. How do we continue to create moments like the Proms, while treading more lightly on the Earth?
With the BBC, the Royal Albert Hall and the Royal Parks each working individually and together to find a shared path, perhaps there is a yellow brick road emerging towards a more sustainable, more resilient Albertopolis.
So we can continue to enter the arena, to gather, perform and listen, side by side.
Written by Alice Rickards, Second Violin of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
