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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Sadler's Wells

The country's dance house, on a site that has had a theatre on it since 1683.

PlayhousesWorth it for the building

Richard Sadler found a well in his garden in 1683, decided the water was medicinal, and built a music house beside it to entertain the people who came to drink it. Six theatres have stood on the spot since; the present one, glass and brick and rather plain from the street, opened in 1998. Lilian Baylis rebuilt the fourth in 1931 and ran it alongside the Old Vic, and the companies that grew here left to become the Royal Ballet, English National Opera and Birmingham Royal Ballet.

What it does now is dance, more of it and from further afield than anywhere else in Britain: it commissions and co-produces as well as receiving, and a season takes in ballet, flamenco, hip hop, contemporary work and companies that have never played here before. There are two more stages besides the main house - the Lilian Baylis Studio upstairs for smaller and newer work, and Sadler's Wells East, which opened in Stratford in 2025 - and the Peacock Theatre in Holborn, which it programmes as its West End house; both are listed here in their own right.

Where
Rosebery Avenue, EC1R 4TN
Nearest station
Angel · 4 min walk

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At related venues

Peacock Theatre

Sadler's Wells East

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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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