Performance venues

The best theatres, concert halls and music venues in London: the West End houses and the playhouses that make their own work, the grand halls, the churches that are concert rooms in all but name, the jazz basements, the comedy clubs, the clubs proper, the rooms above pubs where things start, and the booth on Leicester Square that sells off what the West End has not. 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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St Pancras Old Church

A small church making a very large claim about its age, and one of the best rooms in London for a singer with a guitar.

GigsWorth it for the building

Also in Sacred London and Literary London.

The panels outside say this is one of Europe's most ancient sites of Christian worship and give a date of 314. The evidence for that is thin, and has been since a cartographer first remarked in 1593 that the place looked older than St Paul's. What can be shown is a medieval church here, largely rebuilt by the Victorians.

The churchyard is the better reason to come. Johann Christian Bach is buried in it, and so is John Polidori, who wrote The Vampyre. John Soane designed his own tomb here, and its canopy is widely said to be where Giles Gilbert Scott found the shape of the telephone box. When the railway was cut through, the graves it displaced were stacked around an ash tree by a young architect's assistant named Thomas Hardy; the tree stood until 2022. The Beatles were photographed among the stones in July 1968.

Since 2011 the church has also been a concert room, and a particularly good one for a quiet voice: Laura Marling, Brian Eno, Sinéad O'Connor, Agnes Obel and Sam Smith have all played it.

Where
Pancras Road, NW1 1UL
Nearest station
London St Pancras International · 4 min walk

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Photo by Elliott Brown from Birmingham, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL.

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