Does London really need another concert hall?

Does London need another concert hall? Or, to put it more precisely, does London need another chamber music hall? The recent opening of Milton Court in the Barbican begs this question: a pertinent one since we already hold the world record for full-time concert spaces of fewer than a thousand seats, and must come equal first for symphony-size halls. We also, with the Royal Albert Hall, hold the world record for a jumbo-size venue, fully twice the capacity of a normally large auditorium such as, for example, the one in the Sydney Opera House.

But even in these financially difficult times there remains a strong thirst for expanding our cultural resources. The blurb for the new hall puts the latest expansion like this: ‘With the opening of Milton Court, the new cultural quarter will stretch from the Guildhall School of Music’s two buildings and the Barbican Hall on Silk Street, up to the Barbican’s two newly opened cinemas, and northwards to LSO St Luke’s on Old Street, offering a richly varied range of venues and performances spaces.’ An outsider might think that with the Purcell Room, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Wigmore Hall, Cadogan Hall, St John’s Smith Square, the Kings Place Halls, the Blackheath Halls, Conway Hall, the Roundhouse, the Amaryllis Fleming Hall and Britten Theatre at the Royal College of Music, Duke’s Hall at the Royal Academy of Music, not to mention the symphony halls at the South Bank and Barbican, the Opera Houses, and all the churches, colleges and other part-time venues available for hire, we already have sufficient space for every ensemble known to man to perform in public all at once.