Choral Evensong is a sung service of about forty-five minutes, free and unticketed, held in the late afternoon in buildings that charge £27 or more for a daytime ticket. Westminster Abbey sings it at 5pm on most weekdays and 3pm on Saturdays and Sundays; St Paul's at 5pm most days and 3pm on Sunday; Southwark Cathedral at 5.30pm on most weekday evenings.
It is the same service everywhere: psalms, canticles and an anthem from the Anglican repertoire, two readings and prayers, following the pattern in the Book of Common Prayer. What changes between buildings is the choir, the acoustic and the hour, and those three things are the whole basis for choosing where to go.
Our guides to classical music in London and free live music in London explain what evensong is and how to behave at one. This page does the harder part: the timetable, which choir you will actually hear, which door to use, and where to sit.
Choral Evensong: the practical frame
- Cost
- Free. No ticket, no booking, no collection you must give to
- Length
- About 45 minutes; allow an hour with the entry check
- Best single choice
- Westminster Abbey, in the Quire, 5pm on a weekday
- Cheapest alternative to a £27 ticket
- St Paul's: the sightseeing ticket is £27 for an adult, Evensong is free
- The catch
- You cannot sightsee, wander or photograph during a service
- Choir on holiday?
- Often. A visiting choir or the lay clerks sing instead, and the monthly music list says which
- Dead months
- August and part of September at several churches
The weekly timetable, place by place
Times below were read on each institution's own published calendar in September 2026. Every one of them can change for a feast day, a special service or a choir tour, so glance at the calendar for your date.
| Where | Weekdays | Saturday | Sunday |
|---|---|---|---|
| Westminster Abbey | 5.00pm, most but not all weekdays | 3.00pm | 3.00pm |
| St Paul's Cathedral | 5pm on most days | 5pm | 3pm |
| Southwark Cathedral | 5.30pm, most weekdays | 4pm | 3pm |
| Temple Church | Wednesday 6pm only | - | Choral Mattins or Communion, 11.15am |
| St Martin-in-the-Fields | Wednesday afternoon | - | 5pm, with Choral Classics at 3.15pm |
| St Bartholomew the Great | - | - | 5pm |
The pattern to notice is that the two big cathedrals move their Saturday and Sunday services to the middle of the afternoon while keeping 5pm on weekdays. That makes a weekend visit easier to combine with anything else, and it makes the weekday 5pm service the quiet one.
Saturday is the day you can hear two of them. The Abbey sings at 3pm and St Paul's at 5pm, and the journey between the two takes about fifteen minutes, which leaves time for a cup of tea. On Sunday the Abbey, St Paul's and Southwark all sing at 3pm, so you have to choose. Either way it costs nothing, which puts it on our list of free things to do in London.
Photo: Tipcake · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons · resized
Which choir you will actually hear
This is the part the round-up guides do not tell you, and it changes the experience completely. Cathedral choirs sing to a school timetable and go away, and the gaps are filled by others. Southwark Cathedral's own monthly list for September 2026 shows the full range in a single month: the Cathedral Choir on some evenings, the Schola Cantorum and Lay Clerks on others, the Merbecke Choir on a Sunday, and visiting choirs including a school chapel choir, a chamber choir and the choristers of a Cambridge college.
Westminster Abbey publishes the same information. In the week we checked, three weekday services were sung by the Lay Vicars of Westminster Abbey, the Abbey's professional men, while a Sunday was sung by a visiting parish choir and a Monday by a London chamber choir.
None of these are bad. But a school choir on a Wednesday in half-term is a different evening from the Abbey's own choristers, and the difference is audible in the treble line. If you are travelling a long way for one service, read the music list first: it names the choir and every piece.
Look for "Lay Vicars" or "Lay Clerks" if there are no boys listed. Those are the professional adult singers, and a service sung by men's voices alone is often the most beautiful thing in the building: plainsong, Renaissance polyphony and a dark, even sound that a full choir does not produce.
Which door, and where to sit
At Westminster Abbey, Evensong is in the Quire and entry is by the Great West Door, not the visitor entrance used for sightseeing. The Abbey states plainly that everyone is welcome free of charge and that security checks are in place on entry, so allow ten minutes for the bag check. Arrive twenty to twenty-five minutes early if you want a stall in the Quire itself rather than a seat in the transept, because the Quire fills first and the stewards then seat people further out.
The Quire is the whole point. It is a narrow space with the choir facing each other across it, and sitting inside it means hearing the singing from within rather than down the length of a nave. At Southwark Cathedral the same logic applies and the building is far smaller, so nearly every seat is a good one. At St Paul's the services are under the dome or in the quire, and the famous acoustic means the sound arrives late and blurred if you sit far back.
What you give up by coming to a service
You are in the building, free, but not as a visitor. You cannot walk round, you cannot go into the chapels, you cannot climb anything, and you cannot take photographs. At Westminster Abbey that means no Poets' Corner, no Lady Chapel and no Galleries. At St Paul's it means no dome climb and no crypt.
So Evensong is not a way of seeing these buildings for free. It is a different thing: an hour of the building doing what it was built to do. If seeing the monuments matters to you, pay for the daytime visit and come back in the evening; our comparison of St Paul's or Westminster Abbey helps if you are only paying once, and the best time to visit Westminster Abbey sets out how the Sunday pattern works there.
Arriving late, leaving early, and taking children
Stewards will usually seat a latecomer at the back during a hymn or a reading rather than in the middle of a psalm, so if you are five minutes late, wait quietly at the door and look for a sign. Leaving in the middle is possible but conspicuous in a quire stall; if you think you may need to go, sit at an end.
Children are welcome and nobody minds a small noise. Forty-five minutes of stillness is a lot to ask of a three-year-old, though, and the shorter, brighter option is a Sunday afternoon at St Martin-in-the-Fields, where Choral Classics at 3.15pm runs before Evensong at 5pm and the church, which marks its 300th anniversary in 2026, has a café in the crypt for afterwards.
The Catholic equivalent: Vespers rather than Evensong
Roman Catholic London sings the same office under a different name. Westminster Cathedral is the outstanding case: its choir, founded in 1901, is the only Catholic cathedral choir in the world that sings both Mass and Vespers every day, with up to twenty boys aged eight to thirteen and ten professional lay clerks. Entry to the cathedral and to its services is free. The cathedral's Mass and Divine Office page carries the current times, which we were unable to read automatically, so check it before setting out.
The repertoire is different from the Anglican tradition: Renaissance polyphony, plainsong and a continental sound the choir has cultivated since its first Master of Music revived music that had not been heard in England for centuries. If you have heard evensong at the Abbey and want a contrast rather than a repeat, go there.
The months when the singing stops
Choral foundations follow the academic year, and August is thin everywhere. Temple Church is the clearest example: it holds no services at all in August and September, and its choral year resumed with Evensong on Wednesday 30 September 2026. The cathedrals keep going through the summer with visiting choirs, which is why the music list matters most in the holidays.
At the other end of the year the problem reverses. From late November the carol services and Advent liturgies at the Abbey, St Paul's and St Martin's become the busiest services of the year, and several are ticketed or need an early arrival: Christmas in London covers which ones to book. Holy Week is similar.
If you want the most famous choir in England
It is not in London. King's College Chapel in Cambridge sings Evensong in term, free, in a building that was designed around the sound, and Cambridge is under an hour from King's Cross. Our Cambridge day trip guide explains the chapel's opening hours, its closures and how to time a day around the service. As a London evening it does not work; as a day out it is the best version of this experience in the country.
Closer to home, St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield sings choral evensong at 5pm on Sundays in a twelfth-century priory church with a professional choir, and no longer charges for entry at all. For a small building with a serious musical reputation, it is the best value in the City of London.
Frequently asked questions
Is Choral Evensong free at Westminster Abbey and St Paul's?
Yes. Both state that their regular services are free of charge and need no ticket. At Westminster Abbey you enter by the Great West Door and pass a security check; at St Paul's the cathedral confirms that attending a service costs nothing, while the sightseeing ticket is £27 for an adult and £10.50 for a child.
What time is Choral Evensong in London?
Usually 5pm on weekdays. Westminster Abbey and St Paul's both sing at 5pm on most weekdays, moving to 3pm on Sunday, and the Abbey also sings at 3pm on Saturday. Southwark Cathedral is later, at 5.30pm on most weekday evenings, 4pm on Saturday and 3pm on Sunday.
How long does Choral Evensong last?
About forty-five minutes. Allow an hour in total, because you should arrive fifteen to twenty minutes early for a good seat and because the entry check at the Abbey takes a few minutes. It is short enough to fit between a museum closing and dinner.
Do you have to be religious to attend Evensong?
No. All of these churches welcome visitors of any faith or none, and a large part of any congregation at the cathedrals is there for the music. You are not asked to say or sing anything, and sitting quietly at the back is entirely normal.
Will the cathedral choir be singing, or a visiting choir?
It depends on the week, and it is published. Each cathedral issues a monthly music list naming the choir and the repertoire for every service. In a single month Southwark listed its Cathedral Choir, its Schola Cantorum and lay clerks, a Sunday voluntary choir and several visiting choirs including a Cambridge college and two schools.
Sources
- Westminster Abbey - Evensong, service calendar and location (Internet Archive copy, 2 September 2026; the live site blocks our requests) (checked September 2026)
- St Paul's Cathedral - Choral Evensong in the events calendar (checked September 2026)
- St Paul's Cathedral - Visit us, services free and sightseeing prices (checked September 2026)
- Southwark Cathedral - Choral services, September 2026 list (checked September 2026)
- Temple Church - Weekly services (checked September 2026)
- St Martin-in-the-Fields - Services (checked September 2026)
- Westminster Cathedral - About the Choir (checked September 2026)