NATIONAL THEATRE ARCHITECTURE: DENYS LASDUN'S CONCRETE STRATA ON THE SOUTH BANK

Few buildings in Britain have been loathed and loved with such equal conviction. When the National Theatre opened on the South Bank in 1976, The Economist called it a cultural concentration camp and the Prince of Wales would later compare it to a nuclear power station; John Betjeman wrote to its architect that he had gasped with delight at the sight of it against the sky. By 2000 it was the only building to appear on both of London's most-loved and most-hated lists. Denys Lasdun's answer to all of it was the same: it was not a big building at all, it was a piece of city — terraces of pale concrete stepping down to the river for anyone to walk on, with two blank towers rising out of them to say what happens inside. Half a century on, the terraces are still open, the concrete has weathered to the colour of Waterloo Bridge exactly as he intended, and the argument has mostly been settled in his favour.

Written by Gavin Paisley, director & model-maker at Chisel & Mouse based in Sussex, England.
Last updated: 22-Oct-26.

Photograph by George Rex , licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

National Theatre facade architectural scale model

We've recreated the National Theatre as a handcrafted plaster model

Our National Theatre architectural model captures Lasdun's composition — the stacked terraces, the paired fly towers, the horizontal bands of concrete and glass — as a freestanding plaster piece for a shelf, desk or wall. It is part of our Brutalist architecture models collection.

What is the National Theatre?

The Royal National Theatre is the home of Britain's national theatre company, on the South Bank of the Thames immediately downstream of Waterloo Bridge. It was designed by Sir Denys Lasdun, appointed in November 1963 without a competition, built between 1969 and 1976 by Sir Robert McAlpine, and opened in stages: the Lyttelton in March 1976, the Olivier in October 1976, with the Queen performing the official opening on 25 October 1976, and the Cottesloe — now the Dorfman — in March 1977.

The building contains three auditoria, their foyers, and the workshops, rehearsal rooms and dressing rooms of a producing theatre, all in one block of in-situ concrete cast against rough sawn boards. It has been Grade II* listed since 1994 — Historic England's list entry describes it as a major public building of the postwar period by one of its leading architects — and it is, by common consent, the finest Brutalist building in the country.

Facts panel

Name: Royal National Theatre (the "Royal" was granted in 1988)
Location: Upper Ground, South Bank, London SE1 9PX
Architect: Sir Denys Lasdun, of Denys Lasdun & Partners (partner-in-charge Peter Softley)
Structural engineers: Flint & Neill
Theatre consultants: Theatre Projects Consultants (Richard Pilbrow)
Contractor: Sir Robert McAlpine
Client: South Bank Theatre and Opera House Board; building committee chaired by Laurence Olivier
Designed: 1963–67; built: November 1969 – 1976
Opened: Lyttelton March 1976; Olivier 4 October 1976; royal opening 25 October 1976; Cottesloe 4 March 1977
Cost: approximately £16 million against a plan of £7.5 million
Auditoria: Olivier (approximately 1,160 seats), Lyttelton (approximately 890), Dorfman (approximately 400–450)
Structure: reinforced and post-tensioned in-situ concrete, board-marked, white-pigmented
Listed: Grade II*, 23 June 1994 (Historic England list entry 1272324)
Refurbished: NT Future, 2013–15, Haworth Tompkins

Architect: Denys Lasdun

Denys Lasdun (1914–2001) came out of the Tecton group and the Smithsons' generation but belonged to neither; his buildings share Brutalism's materials and none of its polemic. He had already built the Royal College of Physicians in Regent's Park (1964) — a smaller stack of terraces that reads today as the National Theatre in rehearsal — and would go on to the University of East Anglia's ziggurats and the Institute of Education on Bedford Way. The National Theatre is the work he is remembered for, and the one he fought hardest over: he opposed the alterations of the late 1990s and did not live to see the 2015 refurbishment that finally did what he had wanted all along.

Read our guide to Brutalist architecture for Lasdun's place in the movement, and our Brutalist architecture in London page for his other London buildings.

Thirty years to a site

A National Theatre was first proposed in the nineteenth century and first legislated for in 1949, when Parliament voted a million pounds towards it. Lutyens drew a scheme for a site opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1930s; the Queen Mother laid a foundation stone on the South Bank in 1951, on a site that was later abandoned. When Lasdun was appointed in 1963 the brief was for a thousand-seat main house, a four-hundred-seat experimental theatre and a sixteen-hundred-seat opera house, on land beside the Shell Centre where the London Eye now stands.

The opera house was dropped by the Arts Minister Jennie Lee in 1966–67 — Sadler's Wells Opera went to the Coliseum instead — and in March 1967 the Greater London Council moved the whole project downstream to the present site, previously earmarked for a hotel. Lasdun mirrored his plan left to right, unveiled the revised scheme in November 1967 and finally saw construction begin on 3 November 1969. Seven years and roughly double the budget later, it opened.

The idea: strata

Lasdun's word for the building was strata. Rather than a single monumental block, the National Theatre is a set of horizontal terraces — layers of rock, in his metaphor — that step down from the fly towers towards the river and out into the city on every side. They are not decoration: the terraces are the foyers' outdoor rooms, open to anyone with or without a ticket, and they carry the South Bank's riverside walk up into and through the building. The two blank fly towers, rising from the layers, mark the Olivier and the Lyttelton and break what would otherwise be an entirely horizontal composition.

The building draws its strength, Lasdun said, from Waterloo Bridge, and he set the Olivier's fly tower on the diagonal so that it faces the bridge head-on; the classic approach is still along the bridge from the north bank, though riverside trees now hide much of what he intended you to see.

Photograph by chris.rycroft , licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The plan: a square with a diagonal

In plan the National Theatre is a square. The Lyttelton, a conventional proscenium house, sits in line with the main façades. The Olivier is turned 45 degrees, so that its fan-shaped auditorium points at the river, and the two are linked by a pair of full-height foyers that run between them. Behind and beneath, around a lightwell, are the workshops, paint frames, rehearsal rooms and four tiers of dressing rooms that make this a factory for theatre as well as a place to watch it.

The foyers are where the building's interior is most itself: heavily board-marked concrete walls and piers, deep coffered ceiling slabs, spaces that open from single to triple height. They were planned as a continuation of the terraces outside, and since the 2015 works, which opened up the ground floor to the river, they finally read that way.

The three auditoria

The Olivier is the main house and Lasdun's boldest interior: an open stage in the corner of a fan of roughly 1,160 seats, modelled on the ancient theatre at Epidaurus so that no seat is far from the action. Beneath it is the drum revolve — a twelve-metre cylinder, five storeys deep and weighing over 160 tons, which can rotate, rise and fall to bring whole sets up through the stage floor. Designed by Richard Pilbrow's Theatre Projects, it took a decade to work reliably and remains one of the most elaborate pieces of stage machinery in the world.

The Lyttelton is a two-tier proscenium theatre of around 890 seats, with an adjustable proscenium width and an orchestra-pit lift — the conventional house of the three, and the one that opened first.

The Dorfman, opened as the Cottesloe in 1977, is a flexible studio designed by Iain Mackintosh and Theatre Projects that can be arranged end-on, thrust, in the round, traverse or promenade. It was closed in February 2013, rebuilt as part of NT Future and reopened as the Dorfman on 30 September 2014, named for the Travelex founder Lloyd Dorfman, whose £10 million gift anchored the project.

Concrete: cast against timber, pigmented to match the bridge

The National Theatre's concrete is the best in London and the reason the building has aged so well. It was poured in situ against rough sawn timber boards, each plank used twice — once on each side — so that the finished surface carries the grain and the joints of the shuttering. Lasdun had white pigment added to the mix so that the colour would match the Portland stone of Waterloo Bridge and the façade of Somerset House across the water; he wanted it to weather like stone, and said he hoped that in the end lichen would grow on it. Façade drainage was concealed to limit the streaking that disfigures most exposed concrete.

Stand under a terrace soffit and the whole philosophy is there in a single surface: honest about how it was made, carefully controlled in colour, and designed to improve with age.

NT Future: Haworth Tompkins, 2013–15

By the 2000s the building was showing its age, and alterations in the late 1990s — a bookshop and foyer works by Stanton Williams, which Lasdun opposed — had not helped. NT Future, an £80 million programme designed by Haworth Tompkins with theatre consultants Charcoalblue, rebuilt the Cottesloe as the Dorfman, added the Clore Learning Centre and the Max Rayne production centre, opened a riverside café and bar on what had been the service yard at the north-east corner (exposing Lasdun's diagonal struts for the first time), and enlarged the foyer. A temporary theatre, the Shed, stood on the river terrace from 2013 to 2016 while the work went on. The project completed in May 2015 and is generally regarded as having given the building back the openness Lasdun intended.

The argument

The National Theatre divided opinion from the day it opened. The Economist dismissed it; Betjeman, writing to Lasdun in 1976, said he had gasped with delight at the cube of the theatre against a pale blue sky. In 1988 the Prince of Wales described it as a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting — the remark that has followed the building ever since. In 1994 it was listed Grade II*, the first postwar theatre to be listed; in 2000 a BBC poll placed it fourth among Britain's best-loved buildings, and it appeared simultaneously on lists of London's most-loved and most-hated. Since 2007 a lighting scheme on the fly towers has washed them in colour after dark, which has done more for public affection than any amount of argument.

Model-maker's lens

Focus. Not the river front, and not the fly towers. Our model takes a section of the south-western elevation — the side that faces Waterloo Road as it climbs towards the bridge, and the first view most people get of the building on foot from Waterloo station. Here the two terraces cantilever out over a row of ground-floor bays, and three vertical masses — two taller towers flanking a lower block — stand at the face of the building and rise clear of the terraces. It is the strata idea at close quarters: horizontal layers, vertical masses, and nothing else.

Detail. The two terrace slabs do most of the work. They are modelled as continuous horizontal bands, so that the overhang reads and the shadow falls where it falls on the building. Beneath them the ground-floor bays carry fine vertical lines for the glazing, and between the bays the angled concrete columns that help carry the terraces are kept as clean chamfers — the one diagonal in a composition of horizontals and verticals. The three towers are left plain and sheer; board-marking is a texture, not a pattern, and we leave it to the eye.

How it reads at small scale. This stretch of elevation is Lasdun’s whole vocabulary in a few metres — two horizontal layers, three vertical masses — and it loses nothing in reduction. Under a side light the terraces throw two long shadows across the bays below and the towers stand clear above, which is exactly what happens on Waterloo Road at four in the afternoon.

How we made it. Cast in plaster from a mould taken from our master pattern. Finished by hand in our Sussex studio.

Visiting the National Theatre

You do not need a ticket. The building is open from 10am to 11pm Monday to Saturday, and the foyers, terraces and exhibitions are free.

The terraces: walk up from the riverside and keep going; every level is public and the views from the top terraces across the river to Somerset House are the best free view on the South Bank.
The Sherling High-Level Walkway: a free backstage walkway with views down over the set-building, scenic-painting and prop workshops; open Wednesdays and Saturdays, midday to 6pm, at the time of writing, with no booking required — check the National Theatre's website as hours change.
Tours: guided backstage tours and an architecture tour run regularly; book through the National Theatre.
Nearest stations: Waterloo (five minutes), Embankment (across the footbridges), Southwark.
The classic view: from Waterloo Bridge, walking south from the north bank, with the Olivier fly tower straight ahead.

Frequently asked questions about the National Theatre

Who designed the National Theatre in London?

Sir Denys Lasdun, appointed in November 1963 and working with his practice Denys Lasdun & Partners. The National Theatre was built between 1969 and 1976 by Sir Robert McAlpine, with Flint & Neill as structural engineers.

When did the National Theatre open?

In stages. The National Theatre's Lyttelton opened in March 1976, the Olivier on 4 October 1976, the Queen performed the official opening on 25 October 1976, and the Cottesloe (now the Dorfman) followed on 4 March 1977.

Is the National Theatre Brutalist?

Yes — the National Theatre is generally considered the finest Brutalist building in Britain. Its exposed, board-marked, in-situ concrete, monumental fly towers and refusal of ornament are textbook Brutalism, though Lasdun himself never used the word.

Is the National Theatre a listed building?

Yes. The National Theatre has been Grade II* listed since 23 June 1994, the first postwar theatre in Britain to be listed. The Historic England list entry is number 1272324.

What did Prince Charles say about the National Theatre?

In 1988 he described the National Theatre as a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting. The remark has been quoted in almost every article about the building since.

How many theatres are in the National Theatre?

Three: the Olivier (around 1,160 seats, open stage), the Lyttelton (around 890, proscenium) and the Dorfman (around 400–450, flexible studio). The National Theatre's Dorfman opened as the Cottesloe in 1977 and was rebuilt and renamed in 2014.

Why is the National Theatre's concrete striped?

Because it was cast against rough sawn timber boards, which left their grain and joints in the surface — a technique called board-marking. Lasdun also added white pigment so the National Theatre's concrete would match the stone of Waterloo Bridge.

Can you go inside the National Theatre without a ticket?

Yes. The National Theatre's foyers, terraces, exhibitions and the Sherling backstage walkway are all free and open to the public during opening hours (10am–11pm, Monday to Saturday).