The Royal Albert Hall is in Kensington, London, England. There are many other Albert Halls in the UK, and around the world, as well as many people called Albert Hall famous enough to merit an entry in Wikipedia.
Most people will have heard the Beatles song “A Day in the Life” and smirked at the line “now you know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall”, from memory it’s 10,000 in Blackburn, Lancashire.
The Albert Hall has thus been used as a unit of measure.
For example, the Rock of Gibraltar is the biggest rock in the world.
To determine how many Royal Albert Halls would fill the Rock of Gibraltar, we need to compare their volumes. The volume of the Royal Albert Hall is approximately 100,000 cubic meters.
The Rock of Gibraltar has an estimated volume of about 4.5 million cubic meters. Here’s how we calculate:
- Volume of the Rock of Gibraltar: approximately 4,500,000 cubic meters.
- Volume of one Royal Albert Hall: approximately 100,000 cubic meters.
4,500,000 cubic meters100,000 cubic meters per Albert Hall=45
Therefore, approximately 45 Royal Albert Halls would fit within the volume of the Rock of Gibraltar.
A similar calculation tells us 5.64 million Royal Albert Halls could fit inside the volume of the Chicxulub meteor that finished off the dinosaurs.
Besides the Albert Hall and the London bus, i.e. “as
tall as” and “laid end to end” several other informal units of measure have become popular, particularly in the UK and sometimes beyond. Here are a few:
- Football Pitches: Often used to describe large areas of land or the size of events. For example, “The festival covered an area the size of 10 football pitches.”
- Olympic Swimming Pools: Used to describe volumes of liquid or areas, especially in news reports about spills, water usage, or construction projects. An Olympic pool holds 2,500 cubic meters of water.
- Wales: Frequently used to give a sense of scale for large areas or quantities, like “The new forest will be the size of Wales.” Wales is roughly 20,779 square kilometers.
- Double-decker Buses: Similar to the London bus but can refer to any double-decker, used for both volume and area measurements, e.g., “The amount of waste produced could fill 50 double-decker buses.”
- Wembley Stadium: Used for very large gatherings or constructions, “The concert attracted a crowd equivalent to filling Wembley Stadium twice.”
- Coins: Particularly British coins like the “pence piece” (e.g., “about the size of a 50 pence piece” for small dimensions).
- Grains of Sand: About the size of a grain of sand, Also pin heads seemed to be popular in the middle ages as people struggled to calculate the sizes of dancing angels.