First time in London: West End + evening ideas for 6

If you want to guarantee that you get tickets, then buy them in advance through the theatre’s website. You will get the best selection of seats. In the past, I have seen tickets for ”The Play that Goes Wrong” on the TKTS website. You might start monitoring their site to see if they are regularly available.

For evening activities, a couple of suggestions that I have include:
1) Take one of the evening London Walks: https://www.walks.com/
2) Go to one of the museums on an evening when they have late night hours. Both The British Museum and V&A are open late on Fridays.

I use Theatre Monkey because you can see all the shows that are showing and it gives you the website for the actual theatre, where you can book the tickets. I try to book everything as directly as possible. I've always booked my tickets in advance from the actual theatre.

I also highly recommend Mama Mia, Witness for the Prosecution, and The Book of Mormon.

Have a great trip!

If you want to see a specific show, buy the tickets ahead of time especially since there are six of you. Since you're going soon it might be difficult to get six tickets sitting together even if you do buy ahead.

For evening activities, there's always the pub. Other museums also have evening hours depending on day of week (often Friday). Evensong on Wednesday at Westminster Abbey. Skygarden (free, advance tickets required). There might be some ideas on IanVisits https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/calendar/date/2026/05/

We were a group of five and lucked out getting 5 seats together a couple of days in advance for one show but couldn't for another. These were weeknights shows. The closer to the weekend you get, I'd advise you to book in advance.

For long-running plays, like the one you're interested in seeing, you're much more likely to get discount tickets, but if you want to guarantee seats together I would book ahead.

For evening activities, I was going to suggest Friday lates at some of the major museums, which I can see have already been mentioned here- in addition to those mentioned, National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery are also open late. Some are also open late only for special exhibitions so can you check which ones interest you. You'll be here in May so the sun will be setting late- so you also have the option of a nice walk along the river, sitting in a park, etc. Or everyone's favourite, outdoor pints at a pub.

Also, companies offer guided tours that are pub crawls, or ghostly happenings, or jack the ripper themed night-time walks. You could probably figure out any of those on your own or find free info online, to be more budget-friendly.

Unless something has changed fairly recently, only the ground floor of the V&A Museum remains open late. There's plenty to see there, of course, but if some of your group have a special interest in things located upstairs, you should arrive well before standard closing time and hotfoot it upstairs while you can. As in most large museums (and some small ones), they start sweeping people out of the galleries well before closing time. If a museum is said to close at 5 PM, I assume my visit will end by about 4:45 PM.

The British Museum--especially the ground floor--is extremely crowded during much of the day. In my experience the crowds thin out a little toward the late afternoon, so planning that museum for Friday makes a lot of sense if you're prepared to stay into the extended hours. Unfortunately, I found no food available after about 3:30 PM even on Friday, so that's something to think about ahead of time.

Both of the above museums are monstrously large. It takes multiple long days to see them. Take a look at their websites to develop your plan of attack.