5 Best Things to Do in London During the BFI London Film Festival

The BFI IMAX stands on its own island in the middle of the Waterloo roundabout, where Waterloo Road, Stamford Street, York Road and Waterloo Bridge all converge. Bryan Avery designed the glass drum, it opened in May 1999, and the British Film Institute took operation back from Odeon Cinemas in July 2022. The screen was rebuilt that same year at 25.9 metres wide and 19.8 metres tall, making it the largest in the United Kingdom. The auditorium seats 493 people, four of those spaces for wheelchairs.

The festival programmes a handful of large-format titles here every year, and those sell out before anything at BFI Southbank does. The building also keeps a working 15/70mm projector alongside its single-laser 4K IMAX system, so if the 2026 line-up puts anything on 70mm at Waterloo, that is the ticket to chase hardest. Standard adult admission starts at £12 and children aged 14 and under from £10. BFI Members take £2.50 off each seat and avoid the £1 per ticket booking fee.

Seating is banded into Standard, Premium (central, rows L to N) and VIP (rows P and Q, wider with more legroom). On a screen 25.9 metres across the back half is genuinely better than the front, so the surcharge earns its keep. The box office opens thirty minutes before the first screening of the day, which in festival fortnight is often mid-morning rather than lunchtime.

Pro Tip: Use the pedestrian subways from Waterloo station instead of crossing at street level. They surface directly on the IMAX island in about two minutes, and on festival evenings the surface crossings around the roundabout jam solid.

The Prince Charles Cinema occupies 7 Leicester Place, fifty yards north of Leicester Square, in a building put up as a theatre in the early 1960s and converted to repertory in 1991. Two screens hold 404 seats between them, 300 downstairs and 104 in the upstairs room. It is an official BFI London Film Festival venue for 2026, which means part of the programme plays here, a two-minute walk from Leicester Square station and nowhere near the South Bank crush.

What makes it useful in October is that it refuses to clear its own schedule. The repertory strand, the 35mm and 70mm season, the sing-alongs and the all-night marathons all keep running alongside the festival titles, so when everything official has gone there is still something starting. Non-members pay £14.50 for evenings, weekends and bank holiday matinees, and £11 for weekday matinees. A £15 annual membership brings those to £11.50 and £8, adds 15% off the bar and unlocks the regular £1 members' screenings.

Westminster City Council designated the cinema an Asset of Community Value in May 2025 during a lease dispute with its landlord, so the queue on Leicester Place during festival week doubles as a show of support. One practical warning: the box office opens only fifteen minutes before the first film, screen doors open ten minutes before the advertised start, and nobody is admitted more than twenty-five minutes in.

Pro Tip: Take the 300-seat downstairs screen over the upstairs room; the rake is steeper and the sound is better. Check the cinema's own listings at 10:00 alongside the BFI standby release, because the overlap between the two is where same-day seats actually appear.

In February 1896 the Lumiere brothers ran their Cinematographe in the Polytechnic Institution's lecture theatre at 307 Regent Street, the first public film screening in Britain. The room closed to the public in 1980, served as a university lecture hall for thirty-five years, and reopened in 2015 after a £6.1 million restoration. It holds 187 seats, is Grade II listed, and kept its 1936 John Compton organ, which is still played at recitals.

The building is not a BFI London Film Festival venue, and that is the argument for going. Two minutes north of Oxford Circus station, it is close enough to the West End festival cinemas to drop into a gap between screenings, and far enough outside the programme that you can walk up on a Friday in October and get a seat. It projects 16mm, 35mm, Super 8 and 4K digital, so repertory here tends to arrive on actual film.

Full-price seats are not cheap. Adults pay £17 after 17:00 on weekdays and all day Saturday, £15 for weekday screenings before 17:00, and £12.50 on Sundays and bank holidays, with concessions at £15, £12.50 and £10.50. The value sits in two standing offers: Choose Days every Tuesday, where you pick £6, £8 or £10 yourself, and the 13:00 Monday matinee for over-55s at £5. Both land inside the festival's twelve days.

Pro Tip: Tuesday 13 October 2026 is the only Choose Days date inside the festival. Pick the £6 tier online, add the 90p transaction fee, and you have a seat in a Grade II listed 1896 auditorium for less than a standby ticket on the South Bank.

The Cinema Museum occupies the former administration block of the Lambeth Workhouse at 2 Dugard Way, off Renfrew Road in Kennington. Charlie Chaplin was admitted to that workhouse as a child in 1896, when his mother could no longer keep the family together. Ronald Grant and Martin Humphries founded the museum out of their own collection in 1986 and moved it into this building in 1998, where the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust remains the freeholder.

The holdings are the reason to make the trip: every gauge of film projector ever manufactured, art deco cinema seats, ushers' uniforms from the 1940s and 1950s, an estimated one million photographs and around 17 million feet of film, including Mitchell and Kenyon footage shot between 1899 and 1906. This is not a walk-in museum. Admission is by pre-booked guided tour only, tours run about two hours including roughly thirty minutes of short films, and they cost £15 for adults and £12 concession, with carers free.

Sitting 2.2 kilometres from Charing Cross and entirely outside the festival programme, this is the one entry on the list where the second week of October feels like any other week of the year. Book before you leave home, because there are no drop-in hours and the tour schedule is thin. Three resident cats, Garbo, Marble and Jimmy, run the building.

Pro Tip: Reserve a tour slot at cinemamuseum.org.uk at least a fortnight before you travel, and travel to Elephant & Castle rather than Kennington. It is a ten-minute walk from Elephant & Castle and the route is far easier to follow.