Performance venues

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

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Royal Festival Hall

The one building the Festival of Britain left behind, with the most generous free foyer in London under the auditorium.

ClassicalFree to hearWorth it for the building

Photo by Andreas Praefcke, edited by MenkinAlRire, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Everything else on the 1951 festival site was cleared within a year. This survived because it was the one permanent thing built, and it was designed on a principle its architects called an egg in a box: the auditorium is a sealed shell floating inside the outer building, isolated from the trains running along the viaduct behind it.

The part worth knowing about is not the concert hall. The foyers underneath run the width of the building, are open all day whether or not you have a ticket, and have a piano somebody is usually playing, tables nobody moves you off, and a view across the river. It is the least policed indoor public space in central London.

Where
Belvedere Road, SE1 8XX
Nearest station
Waterloo · 5 min walk

On here now

Coming up

At related venues

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Southbank Centre

NearbyPerformance venues

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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