The Royal Festival Hall’s Level 2 foyer spaces are currently being refurbished, as we work to bring you a brand new cafe, bar, shop and Ticket Office. Find out more

Hiring venues for artistic events

Empty view of the auditorium at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre
Morley Von Sternberg

Choose between the Royal Festival Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall

Every year we put on hundreds of events ranging from free gigs to showpiece concerts from the world’s very best performers

Our incredibly diverse programme is renowned for extraordinary festivals like Meltdown as much as it is for its unrivalled classical season. What you may not know is that as part of our artistic programme we’ve room for a select number of public events from external organisers.

We have two fully seated venues at the Southbank Centre available for artistic hire, both of which are world famous and highly in demand:

  • Royal Festival Hall (2,740 capacity)
  • Queen Elizabeth Hall (916 capacity)

Owing to scale, not all venues are suitable for all projects. Our experienced team will lead you through the options and work with you to ensure that the hire is a great fit for you. We welcome enquiries for bookings around 12 – 18 months in advance. Occasionally, we may be able to offer a date sooner than that.

If you do hire one of our venues we’ll ensure that your event is as successful as possible. We’ll deliver the highest levels of production, event management, box office, front of house and marketing support so that when you take to the stage of one of the world’s foremost arts venues, you’ll know you have a great team behind you.

Download further information on hire rates, seating plans, branding, technical specifications, health and safety and more.

View Promoter guidelines

For private events ranging from photo shoots, weddings and product launches to AGMs and corporate events, please get in touch with our Commercial Events or Venue hire teams.

Find out more about commercial events hire

Find out more about venue and wedding hire

If you or your artists are interested in exhibitions, installations or want to be part of our festivals and programmed events - rather than putting on your own event – see our guide below to getting involved with the Southbank Centre.

How to be a part of our programme

Contact us

To find out more about artistic hire get in touch 

Next steps

We’ve designed this process to make sure that the events are successful for everyone involved.

1. Register your interest in holding an event using our booking form below

2. The Artistic Rentals team will assess your proposal and undertake various checks before approaching our Planning team to discuss possible future dates.

3. If everyone is happy, we’ll propose a suitable financial model and give you a named team member to work closely with throughout.

Please note that we cannot guarantee date availability for all projects and that due to the large volume of proposals we receive, unfortunately we are unable to respond to everyone.

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