The Royal Festival Hall is a 2,700-seat concert, dance and talks venue within Southbank Centre in London, England. It is situated on the South Bank of the River Thames, not far from Hungerford Bridge, in the London Borough of Lambeth. It is a Grade I listed building, the first post-war building to become so protected (in 1981). The London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the London Sinfonietta, Chineke! and Aurora are resident orchestras at Southbank Centre.

The hall was built as part of the Festival of Britain for London County Council, and was officially opened on 3 May 1951. When the LCC's successor, the Greater London Council, was abolished in 1986, the Festival Hall was taken over by the Arts Council, and managed together with the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room (opened 1967) and the Hayward Gallery (1968), eventually becoming an independent arts organisation, now known as the Southbank Centre, in April 1998.

The complex includes several reception rooms, bars and restaurants, and the Clore Ballroom, accommodating up to 440 for a seated dinner. A large head and shoulders bust of Nelson Mandela (by Ian Walters, created in 1985) stands on the walkway between the hall and Hungerford Bridge approach viaduct. The sculpture was originally made of fibreglass until re-cast in bronze.^{[citation needed]}

The complex's variety of open spaces and foyers are popular for social or work-related meetings.

The closest tube stations are Waterloo and, across the river via the Jubilee Bridges, Embankment and Charing Cross.

The Festival Hall project was led by London County Council's then chief architect, Robert Matthew, who gathered around him a young team of talented designers including Leslie Martin, who was eventually to lead the project with Edwin Williams and Peter Moro, along with the furniture designer Robin Day and his wife, the textile designer Lucienne Day. The acoustical consultant was Hope Bagenal, working with members of the Building Research Station; Henry Humphreys, Peter Parkin and William Allen. Martin was 39 at the time, and very taken with the Nordic activities of Alvar Aalto and Gunnar Asplund.

The figure who really drove the project forward was Herbert Morrison, a Labour Party politician. It was he who had insisted that Matthew had Martin as his deputy architect, treating the Festival Hall as a special project.

A 1948 sketch by Martin shows the design of the concert hall as the egg in a box. But the strength of the design was the arrangement of interior space: the central staircase has a ceremonial feel and moves elegantly through the different levels of light and air.