Hotels near BFI Southbank

BFI Southbank sits under the southern approach to Waterloo Bridge on Belvedere Road, and it opened as the National Film Theatre on 16 October 1957. Four screens run off a single foyer: NFT1, NFT2, NFT3 and the Studio, which was added in 2007. Norman Engleback designed the original building for the London County Council, and it remains the only cinema in the United Kingdom licensed to project nitrate film. For eleven and a half months of the year this is a calm building with a good bar. During the festival it is not.

From 7 to 18 October 2026 the foyer becomes a queue, the box office works flat out from 11:00 to 20:45, and the printed programme, which ran to 120 pages in 2025, vanishes from the front desk by mid-morning. Standard evening and weekend seats cost £14.50 for non-members and £12.00 for BFI Members, dropping to £9.00 and £6.50 for weekday matinees. Festival screenings started at £10 in 2025, with £6 seats for anyone aged 25 and under, a free scheme worth registering for before you travel.

The counter-intuitive move is to ignore the screens altogether. The BFI Mediatheque on the ground floor costs nothing, opens Tuesday to Sunday from 11:00 to 21:00, and hands you a booth and headphones to pull whatever you like out of the BFI National Archive. During festival week it is the emptiest room on the South Bank, because everybody else is upstairs trying to talk their way into a sold-out premiere.

Pro Tip: Standby tickets for sold-out festival screenings are released daily at 10:00 on the festival website, and the Belvedere Road box office opens at 11:00, which is where returns surface. Do both on the same morning rather than picking one.