Last Updated on September 8, 2025
RAD Shows Off Award-winning Building at Open House
The annual Open House festival is a celebration of London’s architecture, run by the charity Open City to make local communities more knowledgeable and appreciative of their built-up environment. To that end, every year, buildings and other sites across all of London’s 33 boroughs open to the public for about a week in September, inviting visitors to explore and enjoy.
Open House has been going – and growing! – since 1992, and this year includes such diverse buildings as St Andrew’s Church in Leytonstone, Tin Pan Alley (Denmark Street) and the newly built home Sun House, created to blend entirely with its surroundings. And opening its doors for the first time in Open House 2025 is the award-winning building that houses the Royal Academy of Dance, RAD.
If you were to pick two words to describe how the Royal Academy of Dance wants to be seen, you’d go for “open” and “inclusive”. And that is certainly what the building communicates, both at first sight, when you approach it walking along a leafy but otherwise nondescript south London street, and when you tour the premises: spacious, airy and welcoming.
The building was opened in 2022 by the RAD’s Patron, Queen Camilla, and has since won two architectural awards: RIBA London Award 2024 and RIBA National Award 2024.
Conceived by Takero Shimazaki Architects (t-sa), it was imagined as “a continuation of the city, where studios and spaces for learning would feel like buildings, connected by a generous network of indoor ‘streets’ and ‘urban plazas’ to be shared by dancers, teachers, staff and visitors.”
Light, space and neat lines are what first grabbed me when I visited in advance of Open House. The façade, all glass panes and white stone, offers a view of the ample foyer and reception area next to a café with a neat counter behind well-spaced white tables. Further along, there’s a well-stocked shop. The walls of the wide corridors serve as exhibition spaces. They are hung with some stunning portraits of past luminaries, among them Adeline Genée, the Academy’s founder president, the great Russian dancer Tamara Karsavina, another RAD pioneer, and the greatest of them all, Britain’s only Prima Ballerina Assoluta, Margot Fonteyn, who was to become the RAD’s longest serving president.
Two facing corridor walls hold an exhibition of key moments of the RAD Children’s Scholarship Scheme, which ran from 1925-85 and offered a first opportunity to dance to youngsters who would become key names in British ballet, such as Wayne Sleep and Marion Tait.
Seven airy, well-proportioned dance studios welcome Academy students – the Royal Academy of Dance is a higher education institution offering degree courses in dance, dance teaching, and the all-important Benesh dance notation, which helps preserve the exact choreography.
Outsiders, too, are welcome: local communities that participate in outreach initiatives such as Step Into Dance, a wide-ranging programme for secondary schools (that helps plug a lamentable hole in arts provision at schools), and non-members who can rent studio space. The day I visited, I was able to have a very quick peek at a rehearsal of Matthew Bourne’s hardy perennial hit ballet Swan Lake by members of his New Adventures company.
You’re never too old or too young to take part in the RAD’s plethora of programmes, be it Silver Swans – classes tailor-made for the over-55s, of which Queen Camilla herself is on record as being an enthusiastic fan – or classes for young (very young!) – beginners.
The building holds one of Europe’s biggest dance libraries, which is also bathed in natural light and accessible to non-members wishing to carry out relevant research in exchange for a small fee. It boasts a 180-seat multi-purpose theatre that can host the Academy’s own performances, as well as be hired out for non-members’ performances or corporate functions.
In just over 100 years the Royal Academy of Dance, founded in 1920 as The Association of Teachers of Operatic Dancing of Great Britain to overhaul the teaching of the dance in this country, which lagged well behind that of France, Russia and Denmark, has grown into an organisation that boasts of “teaching the world to dance”: it now has over 14,000 members in some 80 countries, all working to the approved Academy syllabus.
And every year, the prestigious Fonteyn ballet competition attracts dance students from across the world, who’ve been trained in the RAD syllabus and know that a coveted Fonteyn medal can open doors in their future as professional dancers.
So, this stunning building, with its rich history, is a welcome addition to Open House. Visit on 14 September in one of a series of guided tours spread throughout the day and led by members of Takero Shimazaki Architects (t-sa).
(All images c/o Royal Academy of Dance)
Open House Festival runs from 13 to 21 September 2025
Royal Academy of Dance participates in Open House on 14 September. To book your visit, click here
Royal Academy of Dance
188 York Road
London SW11 3JZ
If you are interested in dance performances, do check our London Ballet and Dance Previews
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