The Royal Opera House Is Free to Walk Into, and Nobody Seems to Know

On a wet Saturday in February I walked into the Royal Opera House, took an escalator up through a Victorian glasshouse the size of a railway station. Came out on a terrace five floors above Covent Garden and stood looking down at the crowds in the piazza for twenty minutes. I did not have a ticket. I did not buy one. Nobody asked me for anything.

This is the least-used free thing in central London. Everybody knows about the Sky Garden. Almost nobody seems to know you can simply walk into the opera house. Here is what is inside, what the terrace looks over, and the cheapest ways in if you do want to see something on the stage.

Walking In Without a Ticket

The building opens to the public daily from midday and stays open until after the evening performance, or until about eleven at night Monday to Saturday and nine on Sunday if there is nothing on. You go in either from Bow Street or through the newer entrance on Covent Garden Piazza, and then you are simply in.

This is not an accident or a loophole. It was the entire point of a project the building carried out in 2018, unambiguously called Open Up, by the architects Stanton Williams. It cost around thirty-seven million pounds. It enlarged the ground-floor lobby by half, put a glazed pavilion entrance onto the piazza, added a café and a shop at street level and built the four-hundred-seat Linbury Theatre downstairs. The Victorian auditorium was left almost entirely alone. Everything Open Up did was about getting people through the door in the daytime.

What you can do for nothing: walk the public spaces, sit in the Paul Hamlyn Hall, look at the rotating exhibitions and the historic bits of building. Use the ground-floor café and go up to the terrace. What you cannot do without a ticket: use the cloakrooms, or the bars that belong to the auditorium. That is roughly the whole of the restriction.

The Paul Hamlyn Hall Was a Flower Market

The great glass hall you walk into is not part of the theatre at all. It was built between 1858 and 1859 by E.M. Barry as the Floral Hall, a flower market attached to the opera house, all wrought and cast iron and glass with Corinthian columns and a barrel-vaulted roof. The ironwork came from Grissell's Regent's Canal Ironworks. It is listed separately at Grade II.

Then it burned. A fire in 1956 did enough damage that the glass dome and barrel roof were taken down and replaced with a plain pitched roof on steel trusses. So for decades the great Victorian vault simply did not exist. When Covent Garden Market moved out to Nine Elms in 1974 the hall fell into dereliction, and the opera house eventually took it over.

Between 1996 and 2000 the whole structure was dismantled and rebuilt with a replica barrel-vaulted glass roof, and folded into the opera house as its public hall. That was part of a redevelopment by Dixon Jones with BDP that cost around two hundred and fourteen million pounds. It was renamed the Paul Hamlyn Hall in the middle of the 2000s after a ten million pound gift connected to the publisher and philanthropist Paul Hamlyn.

One lovely detail for anyone who has been to Borough Market: the south portico and four bays of the Floral Hall were removed in this process. They were re-erected at Borough in the early 2000s, where they now form that arcaded frontage with the restaurant above. It is listed there in its own right. So the hall you are standing in is about half the length it originally was, and the missing half is across the river selling cheese.

The Terrace, and What You Can See From It

Take the escalators or the stairs up through the hall, or the lift from Bow Street if you need step-free access. You come out on the fifth floor at Cicoria and Bar Cicoria, the restaurant and rooftop bar run by Angela Hartnett.

You do not need a theatre ticket to eat or drink here and walk-ins are welcome. They open from midday to eleven Monday to Saturday and midday to nine on Sunday. Cicoria has a covered terrace and Bar Cicoria is the all-day rooftop bar.

Be clear about what free means. Getting up there costs nothing; sitting down at a table means buying a drink. That still puts it in the same category as the Sky Garden, where the lift is free and the cocktail is not.

The view is straight down onto Covent Garden Piazza. The long glass and iron roofs of the market building, the stone colonnade of Bedford Chambers, the buskers working the west end of the square. The crowds funnelling in from James Street and the central London skyline beyond. It is not a high view and it is better for that. You are close enough to watch what individual people are doing, which a fiftieth-floor viewing platform cannot give you. On a grey afternoon with the umbrellas out it is genuinely lovely.

Three Theatres, Two Fires and a Salvaged Frieze

There have been three theatres on this site. The first, the Theatre Royal Covent Garden, opened in December 1732, built by John Rich on the profits of The Beggar's Opera. Handel ran opera seasons here from 1735 until his death in 1759. It burned down in 1808.

The second, by Robert Smirke, opened in 1809 and burned down in 1856. The third is the one you are standing in, by E.M. Barry, opened in May 1858 with Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, renamed the Royal Opera House in 1892, and now Grade I listed. During the war it was a Mecca dance hall. It reopened as an opera house in February 1946 with The Sleeping Beauty.

Go outside onto Bow Street and look up at the portico. The frieze by John Flaxman above it did not come with Barry's building. It was salvaged from the 1809 theatre after the 1856 fire and reused, which means the oldest thing on the front of the building is older than the building. It shows ancient and modern drama and was modelled on the Parthenon marbles.

While you are outside, look for the Bridge of Aspiration on Floral Street, a twisting glass and aluminium tube from 2003 linking the opera house to the Royal Ballet School. It is made of square frames each rotated four degrees from the last. Dancers cross it. You can stand underneath it for free.

It Is Not Called the Royal Opera House Any More, Sort Of

In April 2024 the organisation rebranded as Royal Ballet and Opera, with a new logo and a new web address. The reasoning was straightforward: the Royal Ballet and the Royal Opera have shared this building since 1946, and a name that mentioned only opera made half the work invisible.

The building, however, is still called the Royal Opera House. So both names are correct, depending on whether you mean the bricks or the companies. Nobody in Covent Garden has changed what they call it.

Cheap Ways Into the Royal Opera House

If you want to actually see something, the prices are less frightening than the reputation.

Young RBO is the standout. If you are between sixteen and twenty-five, you register for free and tickets are thirty pounds, with extra events on top. That is less than a decent seat at a West End musical.

Demand-led pricing came in during September 2025, which means top-tier seats move with demand and have gone up sharply. The important nuance is that the lower price tiers, Young RBO and Access Scheme tickets are excluded from those adjustments, so the cheap seats have been protected while the expensive ones have not. Every ticket also holds its original price for a week after going on sale.

Live at Lunch runs in the Paul Hamlyn Hall on Fridays at one o'clock, about forty-five minutes, no interval, five pounds. Step-free by lift. It is the easiest possible way to hear something properly sung under that glass roof.

The Behind the Scenes Tour is twenty-five pounds for adults and about seventy-five minutes. It takes in rehearsal studios, the costume department on weekdays, the technical and lighting areas, the prop department, and a look at the empty auditorium from the stalls. There are also on-stage and after-hours variants and a tour of the production workshop out at Thurrock.

There are multi-buy discounts on stalls seats for three or more performances, group rates, ticket draws and school matinees. There was also a Friday Rush scheme releasing cheap tickets at one o'clock each Friday for the following week. Check whether it is still running before you plan around it, because it has been in flux.

One thing to stop expecting: the free big-screen relays into Trafalgar Square and the piazza were the BP Big Screens, and BP's thirty-three-year sponsorship ended in December 2022. The cinema screenings and the streaming service are both paid now.

Visiting the Royal Opera House: Practical Notes

📍 Address: Bow Street, London WC2E 9DD, with a second entrance on Covent Garden Piazza.

🚇 Getting there: Covent Garden station on the Piccadilly line is closest but is lift-and-stairs only and gets extremely congested. For step-free travel use Leicester Square, Holborn or Tottenham Court Road and walk.

⏰ Opening: the building is open to the public daily from midday. Hours have shifted in the past couple of years and some older pages still say ten in the morning, so check on the day if you are making a special trip.

🎫 Cost: free to walk in. Coffee at the ground-floor café, a drink on the terrace, five pounds for Live at Lunch, twenty-five for the tour, thirty for a Young RBO seat.

⏳ How long to allow: half an hour to look round, an hour if you sit down with a coffee, two if you take the tour.

♿ Access: step-free entrances on both Bow Street and the piazza, lifts throughout, accessible toilets, and a free Access Scheme you can join. There is no Changing Places facility.

One current note: with the UK threat level raised in 2026, bag checks on entry are more thorough than they used to be. Allow a couple of extra minutes.

🗺️ Nearby: Covent Garden market is directly below you and has been known to fill up with neon. For the other free views in town there is the Sky Garden, the rooftop terrace at 25 Cannon Street and the fiftieth-floor platform at 8 Bishopsgate.

Go on a wet afternoon, take the escalator up through the glass, get a coffee and sit down. It is the most civilised free half hour in the West End and the doors are open from midday.

_______________________

Did you enjoy this article? If you'd like to contribute to the running costs of WithinLondon, click the button below:

All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.