St Mary Le Strand Church
St Mary Le Strand Church is a live music venue in London, GB, housed in an early 18th-century English Baroque church designed by James Gibbs. Completed in 1723, it was the first of twelve churches built under the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches after the Great Fire. The venue seats 120 people and is known for its perfect acoustic for music, making it an intimate setting for classical concerts, including guitar performances, piano concertos, and piano trios, often presented as candlelight events. Architecturally distinctive, the church has no ground-floor windows—a deliberate choice to reduce street noise from the Strand—and features a rose-plastered coffered ceiling, columns, pilasters, and a multi-tiered spire. It is the official church of the Women's Royal Naval Service and has literary ties as the site of Charles Dickens’ parents’ 1809 wedding. Recent pedestrianization of the Strand has improved access to this landmark, which architectural historian Simon Jenkins called the finest eighteenth-century church in London.