Bechstein Hall

If you’ve ever strolled to the Wallace Collection or hurried to an appointment in Harley Street, fled an overcrowded Selfridges or sat on a sunny bench in Cavendish Square Gardens, you’ll probably have walked past the Wigmore Hall. It’s easy to miss – a wrought-iron canopy and a small mosaic embedded in the pavement the only signage. But this ‘modest building tucked away behind a busy London shopping street’ contains multitudes. Now celebrating its 125th birthday, it has been variously described as ‘London’s most sumptuous temple of music’ and the symptom of a ‘faded, bombed-out world’; ‘a place where it was possible to experience the exotic, unfamiliar and bizarre’ and one filled with ‘too many dull concerts and too many indifferent debut pianists’.