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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 1818 house where the National Theatre began, and never a subsidised one.
PlayhousesWorth it for the building
It opened in 1818 as the Royal Coburg, in a Waterloo that was still half fields, and was built by Rudolphe Cabanel of Aachen. What made it matter was Lilian Baylis, who took over the management in 1898 and from 1914 ran Shakespeare here on almost no money at all. The company she built became the core of the National Theatre when it was founded in 1963 under Laurence Olivier, and the National played in this room until the South Bank building opened in 1976.
About a thousand seats, and it produces its own work rather than receiving other people's. It takes no regular public subsidy, which for a theatre of this size and history is the unusual part.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.