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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
Three concert halls, a gallery and a poetry library on one concrete raft, and the foyers are free.
ClassicalFree to hearWorth it for the building
The largest arts centre in Europe, and the only part of the 1951 Festival of Britain that was meant to stay. The Royal Festival Hall went up for the festival; the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Purcell Room and the Hayward Gallery followed in the 1960s in raw concrete, walkways and terraces, and the whole thing has been argued about ever since. Between them the halls carry orchestras, chamber music, jazz, folk, gigs, dance, spoken word and the London Literature Festival, and the Hayward puts on some of the most serious contemporary art shows in the city.
What matters if you are not buying a ticket is that most of it is open anyway. Since the Greater London Council's Open Foyer policy of 1983 the Royal Festival Hall has been open daily to anyone who walks in, with a piano somebody is usually playing and tables nobody moves you off. The National Poetry Library is on the fifth floor and is free to join. The undercroft below the Queen Elizabeth Hall has been skated since the early 1970s and was saved from redevelopment in 2014.
Foyers open daily and free; performances by ticket.
No site-wide opening times are published; the Hayward Gallery and the National Poetry Library keep their own.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.