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London's stages and concert rooms: the West End houses and the playhouses that make their own shows, the grand halls, the churches with a musical life, the jazz basements, the comedy clubs, the clubs proper, and the rooms above pubs where things start. What is on is listed under each venue, and in What's On.
What is on at them this week is in What's On: Performance
Lasdun's stacked concrete terraces, hated on sight and now hard to imagine the river without.
PlayhousesFree to hearWorth it for the buildingCheap day seats
Also in Architecture.
Denys Lasdun's building opened in 1976, thirteen years after Laurence Olivier founded the company at the Old Vic. He designed it as geology rather than architecture - horizontal strata of board-marked concrete, the grain of the shuttering left in the surface, with terraces layered outward so that the foyers spill towards the river and the fly towers rise behind. Opinion was split from the start: even Nikolaus Pevsner, no enemy of modern architecture, found the concrete overbearing, and the future Charles III later compared it to a nuclear power station. The foyers are free and open all day, which is the best way to understand it: the inside is one continuous public room on many levels.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.