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

Wigmore Hall

Five hundred and fifty-two seats, an Arts and Crafts cupola over the stage, and the chamber acoustic every other hall in London is measured against.

ClassicalWorth it for the building

London, Wigmore Street with Wigmore Hall — Photo by Photo: Andreas Praefcke, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It was built in 1901 by Bechstein, the German piano makers, as the recital room attached to their showroom next door - which is why a hall of this quality sits on an ordinary shopping street with almost no frontage. In 1916 the British government seized it as enemy property, sold it off with the shop, and it was renamed after the street.

What it was built for is exactly what it still does: chamber music, song and early music, played to 552 people in a room small enough that nobody is far from the stage. The cupola above the platform, painted with a figure of the Soul of Music gazing at the Genius of Harmony, has been there since the opening. Musicians talk about the acoustic the way cooks talk about a knife.

Where: 36 Wigmore Street, W1U 2BP
Nearest station: Bond Street · 4 min walk

Google Maps wigmore-hall.org.uk

On here now

Coming up

NearbyPerformance venues

NearbyOther Categories

See more nearby listings

Submit a correction for this listing.

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