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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
The best-raked floor in London: a 1929 cinema whose stalls slope towards the stage.
GigsWorth it for the building
It opened on 19 August 1929 as the Astoria, one of the atmospheric cinemas built to look like somewhere else — in this case a Mediterranean garden, with a proscenium modelled on a Venetian street scene and a ceiling painted as a night sky. The plasterwork is still there above the lighting rig.
What musicians and audiences actually talk about is the floor. The stalls were laid out for a cinema and slope steeply down to the stage, so a five-thousand-capacity room gives almost everyone a sightline, which is rare at this size and is why the Academy is the venue bands aim at on the way up.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.