Emma Cons’s opera evenings, Lilian Baylis’s theatre and a company sung in English, 1889–1968.

English National Opera began as a habit rather than a company. English Wikipedia says that in 1889 the philanthropist Emma Cons, who ran the Old Vic theatre in a working-class part of London, started fortnightly performances of opera excerpts. Licensing law of the day ruled out full costumed productions, so she gave condensed versions of well-known operas, always sung in English. In 1898 she brought in her niece Lilian Baylis to help run the theatre, together with Charles Corri as musical director, and the pair worked to make opera a regular part of the Old Vic’s week.

Cons died in 1912 and left the Old Vic to Baylis, who, the encyclopedia says, wanted to turn it into a “people’s opera house”. By the 1920s the Old Vic could no longer hold both her drama and her opera, and she turned to the derelict Sadler’s Wells theatre in Islington. After a public appeal in 1925, with help from the Carnegie Trust, she bought the freehold; building began in 1926 and a new theatre was ready by Christmas 1930. The opera season began on 20 January 1931 with Carmen.

For a few years both theatres played both art forms under the shared name Vic-Wells. By 1934, English Wikipedia says, the Old Vic had become the home of spoken drama and Sadler’s Wells housed the opera and a ballet company that Baylis had co-founded with Ninette de Valois in 1930. Those three strands later became, respectively, the National Theatre, English National Opera and The Royal Ballet.

The company reopened Sadler’s Wells in June 1945 with Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. It kept the policy of giving operas in English. By the late 1960s the Islington house was too small. When the London Coliseum lease became available, managing director Stephen Arlen pressed for the move. A ten-year lease was signed in 1968, and the last performance at Rosebery Avenue, a revival of Peter Grimes, was given on 15 June 1968.

A Matcham variety palace, a borrowed name and a new one chosen in 1974.

The building the company moved into was never meant for opera. English Wikipedia says the London Coliseum on St Martin’s Lane was designed by the architect Frank Matcham for the impresario Oswald Stoll, begun in 1903 and opened on 24 December 1904 as the London Coliseum Theatre of Varieties, a family variety house whose original motto was pro bono publico, “for the public good”. It was called the Coliseum Theatre from 1931 until 1968 and from 1963 to 1968 ran as a Cinerama cinema.

When it was listed at Grade II* on 20 September 1960, English Heritage described an “exuberant Free Baroque” design with marble-faced foyers and a three-tier auditorium full of classical detail. It reverted to its original name, the London Coliseum, in 1968. A further renovation ran from 2000 to 2004, with the architects RHWL and Arup as acousticians and building engineers.

The company opened at the Coliseum on 21 August 1968 with a new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni directed by John Gielgud, still under the name Sadler’s Wells Opera. That name soon became a problem. English Wikipedia quotes the director Glen Byam Shaw’s complaint that taxi drivers kept taking patrons up to Rosebery Avenue, and Lord Harewood, who succeeded Arlen as managing director in 1972, held it an elementary rule that “you must not carry the name of one theatre if you are playing in another one.” Covent Garden objected to suggestions such as “The British National Opera” or “The National Opera”. In the end the government settled the question, the title English National Opera was approved, and the board adopted it in November 1974.

The new name carried an offshoot. In 1977 a second company based in Leeds was set up as ENO North; in 1981 it became the independent Opera North. ENO acquired the freehold of the Coliseum in 1992, and the theatre is also the London base of English National Ballet. The commitment to English has stayed central, though since October 2005 the Coliseum has shown surtitles, after a long internal debate. In December 2023, English Wikipedia records, ENO announced plans for a main base in Greater Manchester by 2029, alongside its home at the Coliseum.

A singing face, a slimmer O and posters that lead with a story.

When an opera company and a ballet company share one stage, the identity has to hold two art forms without letting either one swallow the other. A common answer is a family of names: an umbrella name for the house, then two sub-names that share a typeface, a grid and a way of setting dates, but use different photography, different colour accents or different poster formats. Dance is often shown in motion and opera in close-up, so the image style does a lot of the separating while the typography keeps them related. Season brochures face the same choice at a larger scale, deciding whether to interleave the two programmes by date or to print them as two books inside one cover.

Rebuilt and reconstructed houses add another layer. Where an old façade survives in front of a new interior, the outside tends to carry the history and the inside the present, and the printed material has to bridge the two without pretending the building is older or newer than it is. Language is part of the system too. Surtitles above or beside the stage need a clear, legible face that sits quietly in the dark, often in two languages at once, while programme books may carry the libretto, essays and cast lists in yet another combination of languages. Festival seasons and touring productions then borrow the house style for a few weeks, so a workable system leaves room for a temporary name, a different colour or a new venue without breaking the frame.

From Mike Dempsey’s bus-ride sketch to Rose’s one-weight letters.

The ENO mark is a face. In an excerpt from Mike Dempsey’s Graphic Journey published by Logo Design Love on 17 April 2012, the designer recalled that ENO approached his studio, Carroll Dempsey & Thirkell, after seeing its work for the London Chamber Orchestra, and that the company’s director of corporate affairs, Keith Cooper, chose the studio before their meeting ended. Dempsey said the idea came while he sketched open-mouthed singers on the No. 38 bus down the Kingsland Road: the face turned into an E and an N for the eyes and a large O for the mouth. He presented it as the sole option, and the studio went on to overhaul the rest of the company’s graphics.

Grafik, in a piece by the designer and academic Bryan Clark on 4 November 2014, said the mark launched in 1987; Design Week gave 1990 in November 2015 and 1991 in December 2016. Clark described the open-mouthed O and the almost wincing eyes of the E and N and a mark that sat at the head of a poster while photography by Michael Hoppen and illustration by Ian Crockart carried each production.

The refresh came from the London studio Rose. Design Week reported in its 16–22 November 2015 issue that the “singing” O had been kept but slimmed down: the ENO letters had been set in three weights, with the O heaviest, and were now one weight and appeared on the company’s Twitter profile. On 22 December 2016 the magazine described an 18-month project, begun in late 2014, in which Rose redrew the logo in a bespoke cut of FF Brown and built a brand strategy around the “unforgettable story” at the centre of each opera. Posters lead with a short synopsis rather than the opera’s title, which Rose partner Simon Elliott compared to the blurb on the back of a paperback, and they note that every production is sung in English. Rose was also to add signage and wayfinding at the Coliseum alongside a new front of house by the architect Robin Snell.

For a design guide, English National Opera shows how a company can keep one idea for decades: a mark that reads as a singer’s face, thinned rather than replaced, inside a building whose Edwardian plasterwork does the rest. Compare the Royal Opera House and National Theatre guides. For this guide we use open-O black, Matcham plaster, Baroque gilt and stall red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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