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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 oldest surviving grand music hall in the world, built behind a row of houses and left standing by accident.
ClassicalOperaMusic halls & varietyWorth it for the building
John Wilton built the hall in 1859 in the yard behind five terraced houses on Graces Alley, which is why you go in through what looks like a pub and find a barrel-roofed auditorium on the other side. It lasted as a music hall for twenty barely years before a fire and licensing changes ended it, and then spent a century as a Methodist mission, a rag warehouse and very nearly a demolition site.
The restoration finished in 2015 and deliberately stopped short of making it look new: the plaster is left bare where it fell away, and the room is patched rather than replaced. Opera companies and small ensembles use it constantly, because there is nowhere else in London that sounds or looks anything like it.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.