Candlelit concerts in London: what they are and what they cost

Candlelit concerts have become one of the more reliable ways to spend an evening in London, and they cover two quite different things that share a name. One is a commercial series with a marketing budget. The other is a church tradition that has been running for centuries and is sometimes still free. Both are worth going to, for different reasons and at very different prices.

The Candlelight series

These are the ones you have seen advertised: a string quartet, several thousand candles, and a programme built around a familiar name rather than a composer. Tribute evenings to Queen, ABBA, Fleetwood Mac, Taylor Swift, Oasis, Leonard Cohen and Hans Zimmer run alongside the straight Vivaldi and Chopin nights. They are run by Fever, and in September 2026 its London page was carrying seventy-one of them.

What they actually cost. The advertised figure is always a “from” price and it is the cheapest tier in the room. Those headline prices ran from £9 for Vivaldi’s Four Seasons at St Martin-in-the-Fields and £13.65 for a Southwark Cathedral tribute night, through the commonest price of £21 at Central Hall Westminster and Banking Hall, up to £35 for most of the St Mary le Strand programme and £45 at the 1901 Arts Club. Inside one concert the spread is wider still: the Hans Zimmer night at Central Hall Westminster advertises from £21 and its own booking page lists tiers at £24, £25, £43, £45.50, £53.50 and £78, each with a booking fee of about five per cent on top. Read the tier before you read the headline.

What you are buying. Sixty minutes of live music with no interval, indoors, with seating assigned by zone rather than first come first served, and an age limit of eight and over. Doors open forty-five minutes before the start and close fifteen minutes before it, and late entry is not permitted, so the arriving-early advice is about getting in at all rather than getting a better seat.

The venues are the real draw and are better than the format suggests: Southwark Cathedral, Central Hall Westminster, the Great Hall at Barts, Banqueting House on Whitehall, Banking Hall, St Mary le Strand, St James’s Piccadilly, Cadogan Hall, Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church on Shaftesbury Avenue and the 1901 Arts Club. Several of these are buildings you would otherwise struggle to get inside in the evening, which for some people justifies the ticket on its own.

The honest note: the candles are electric, which is why the series sells “premium electric candles” in its own shop, and the acoustic in a cathedral flatters a quartet enormously. If you go expecting a recital you may find it slight. If you go expecting an hour in a beautiful room with live strings, it delivers exactly that.

The free ones, and the cheap ones nobody advertises

Evensong is the one that is still genuinely free. St Paul’s says so plainly: its regular services, evensong among them, are free of charge, most need no booking, and you can turn up as you are, with a donation basket at the door on the way out rather than a till on the way in. Southwark Cathedral keeps choral evensong in its own services calendar. It is the oldest candlelit music in the city by several centuries and nobody markets it at all.

St Martin-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square is no longer the free option it was. Its lunchtime concerts are ticketed: the Paddington Trio’s Brahms and Haydn programme is £10 on the church’s own booking page. That is still the cheapest way to hear a professional trio in central London, but turn up expecting to pay. The church also runs its own candlelit concerts by night and is celebrating three hundred years of the Gibbs building this season, so its autumn programme is fuller than usual. Confusingly, it is also a Candlelight venue: the £9 Vivaldi listed above is in this building.

The Wren churches around Bank and Cheapside keep up the weekday lunchtime recital tradition, and each one publishes its own terms, so check the church rather than assuming.

Sir John Soane’s Museum has come off this page for now. The free, ticketed, first-Tuesday candlelit evening that made it the best thing here is not in the museum’s current programme: what its what’s on lists instead is Soane Late, a ticketed evening opening at £25, the next on 25 September 2026. We will put the candlelit evening back the day the museum publishes one.

Carols, and how to get into one

From late November the carol services start, and the pattern is worth knowing. The charity carol services at St Paul’s, Southwark and the big West End churches are ticketed, often free or by donation, and released through the charity rather than the church. They go quickly and they are announced in October and early November.

The ordinary parish and cathedral carol services in the week before Christmas are open to anyone, need no ticket, and you simply turn up. Arrive forty minutes early for a cathedral and ten for a parish church.

The commercial series runs its own Christmas programme alongside them, and it is on sale well before the churches announce theirs: Christmas Classics at Central Hall Westminster from 12 to 18 December, from £21, and Christmas by Candlelight at Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church from 21 November to 26 December, from £20. Our Christmas guide covers the rest of the season.

Which to book

If you want an occasion and do not mind paying for it, book a Candlelight evening in a venue you have never been inside, and buy the cheap tier early rather than the dear tier late. If you want the music, go to evensong, spend nothing, and put the money towards dinner afterwards. If you want both, the £10 lunchtime concert at St Martin’s is the best value on this page.

Either way, December sells out. The candlelit evenings are the first thing to go in the London Christmas calendar, and every price above is a “from” price read off the seller’s own page on 20 September 2026.