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London's societies, institutes and universities, and the doors they open to everyone else: lecture theatres, libraries, collections and free exhibitions at institutions that have been arguing about the world since the seventeenth century. Most of it costs nothing. Events are also listed under What's On.
Talks and exhibitions this week are in What's On
An adult education college whose free public lectures have run since 1882, and are still called the Penny Lectures.
Public talksFree to enterWorth it for the building
In 1882 Emma Cons began putting on talks at the Old Vic, which she was then running as a temperance music hall, to bring science within reach of the people working around Waterloo. The first was called The Telephone, or How to Talk to a Man a Hundred Miles Away. Seats cost threepence in the balcony, tuppence in the pit and a penny in the gallery, and the name stuck.
The lectures drew such crowds that classes grew out of them, and those classes became the Morley Memorial College for Working Men and Women, founded at the Old Vic and moved half a mile down the road to Westminster Bridge Road in 1924. Speakers over the years have included Alfred Cort Haddon, who more or less invented modern anthropology, and John Wolfe Barry, the engineer of Tower Bridge.
They still run, free and open to anyone, in the Holst Room, the Emma Cons Hall and Morley Gallery, and the subject has widened from science to whatever an artist, performer, maker, producer or writer has come to talk about.
Penny Lectures by date, usually at 18:30; the programme is on the college's own page
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.