Programmes & Playbills

City of Westminster Archives Centre has built a collection of over 100,000 programmes and thousands of playbills to the West End and other London theatres.

The majority of our theatre programmes and playbills are acquired by donation. If you are interested in donating your collections to Westminster City Archives, please see our Donations page for FAQ and contact details.

Playbills

The majority of our playbills date back to the 19th century, although we do have some 18th century and 20th century bills in the collection.

By the 19th century, playbill design had become quite elaborate, making them a wonderful resource for art and design students as well as theatre historians and biographers.

Playbills typically offer the following information:

• Name of the theatre
• Name of production(s)
• Names of the actors and their roles
• Performance times and dates
• Seat prices

Our playbills are manually arranged by theatre name and date. We are near completion of a performance database project, which will allow remote access to information on our playbill holdings. In the meantime, please contact us to find out whether we have playbills for particular theatres, actors and productions.

Programmes

Our collections comprise over 100,000 programmes, covering most theatres that have operated in the West End and Westminster since the mid-19th century. 

Programmes can be extremely colourful and decorative cultural records of London's entertainment past, with beautiful cover designs and contemporary local adverts. As with playbills, they usually offer researchers the following information

Souvenir programmes are more lavish in design, and often include additional information and images. Some souvenir programmes may even include the script or libretto of the production.