Explore London

The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden is the home of The Royal Opera and The Royal Ballet, known together as the Royal Ballet and Opera since 2024. The present theatre, the third on the site, opened in 1858; its façade, foyer and auditorium survive, while most of the complex was rebuilt in the 1990s, when the iron-and-glass Floral Hall became a public foyer.

Shakespeare's Globe is a reconstruction of the open-air Elizabethan playhouse for which William Shakespeare wrote many of his plays, built on Bankside in Southwark and completed in 1997. Guided tours lead into the timber-framed, thatched theatre, and the complex also holds the candlelit indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

The Royal Albert Hall is a concert hall in South Kensington, opened by Queen Victoria in 1871 as part of the memorial to Prince Albert, with the Albert Memorial facing it across Kensington Gore. The oval, domed hall seats about 5,270 and has hosted the BBC Proms every summer since 1941. More than 390 shows a year take place in the main auditorium.

Alexandra Palace is a Victorian entertainment venue on a hill in Alexandra Park, north London, designed by John Johnson and Alfred Meeson. It opened in 1873, burned down two weeks later and was rebuilt in 1875. In 1936 the BBC began its regular television service here, and the transmitter mast is still in use.