When conservation architect Abha Narain Lambah first stepped into the Royal Opera House in 2007, she felt she had walked onto the set of Great Expectations. “It was really like walking into some strange dream, like Miss Havisham’s mansion,” she recalled. The chandeliers were hung with cobwebs and the plaster was peeling. Steel girders had corroded so badly that, she says, “one could peel layers of the metal with one’s bare fingers.”

The roof leaked, balconies leaned, and the south staircase had collapsed.

Today the 575-seat auditorium hosts Sufi poetry, jazz, literary conversations and diplomatic roundtables, often in the same week. This October, the building marks ten years since it reopened, and 110 years since it first opened its doors.

A landmark changes hands

Conceived in 1908, inaugurated by King George V in 1911 and completed in 1916, the Opera House brought together European and Indian architectural influences.…