Handel lived at 25 Brook Street for 36 years and wrote Messiah in the back room. From 17 September, the letters that argued him into writing it go on display in the same house, alongside loans from the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Collection and the V&A.
Hallelujah House: Inside Handel’s HQ opens at Handel Hendrix House on Thursday 17 September and runs until 14 March 2027. It is included in the standard ticket, which is £14.50 and also gets you into the Hendrix flat next door.
It also marks 25 years since Handel’s house was first opened to the public, in 2001, which is the other thing this show is quietly doing: making the case for the building itself.
The argument the exhibition makes, via curator Olwen Foulkes, is that the Handel most people picture is wrong. “Handel was not just a creative genius,” she says, “but someone who could organise, entertain, network and work ferociously hard to produce his brilliant music.” Brook Street was less a composer’s retreat than a business address: rehearsal room, office, box office and green room, all in one Mayfair terrace.
What is actually on show
The headline loan is Handel’s correspondence with Charles Jennens, the librettist who assembled the text of Messiah and then spent years telling Handel what he thought of the setting. There is also a score leaf from Esther, and a manuscript made for Elizabeth Legh, one of Handel’s most devoted early collectors.
From the National Portrait Gallery come Philip Mercier’s The Music Party and a portrait of Thomas Britton, who is the best story in the building. Britton sold charcoal for a living and from 1678 ran what amounted to London’s first public concert series in the loft above his Clerkenwell shop. Handel is generally thought to have played there. A violin believed to have been used in Britton’s band is in the show too.
The oddest object is a book by John Taylor, the travelling oculist who operated on both Handel and Bach and left both of them worse off than before. It comes on loan from the College of Optometrists, which is either very funny or slightly grim depending on your mood. Further loans come from the Royal Collection Trust, the V&A, the Foundling Museum and private collections, along with period engravings of the London venues Handel was filling.
And there is a house party, three nights only
Separately, Classical DJ, the alias of Radio 3 presenter Georgia Mann, is taking over all four floors of the museum for the Hallelujah House Party: Friday 18 and Saturday 19 September, 6.30pm to 8.30pm, and Sunday 20 September, 2pm to 4pm. Tickets are £30 and include museum entry, with under-12s free on the Sunday. It is the same territory as the museum’s Baroque & Roll weekends, which are consistently the most fun thing it does.
Our take: this is a small museum and an hour and a half covers it, which is exactly why it works. Go on a weekday if you can, because the rooms are narrow and six people constitutes a crowd. Do Handel at 25 Brook Street first and the Hendrix flat at 23 second, in that order, because going forwards in time makes the party wall between them land properly. Bond Street station is two minutes away and the whole thing sits a few doors off the Claridge’s end of Brook Street, so it pairs easily with the rest of Mayfair.
Need to know
- What: Hallelujah House: Inside Handel’s HQ, a new exhibition on Handel as impresario as well as composer
- Where: Handel Hendrix House, 25 Brook Street, Mayfair, W1K 4HB
- When: 17 September 2026 to 14 March 2027, Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm, last entry 4pm
- Price: £14.50 adults, £10.50 students, £5 for 13 to 17s, under-12s free with a family, carers free. Included with a National Art Pass or Historic Houses membership
- The house party: 18 and 19 September, 6.30pm to 8.30pm, and 20 September, 2pm to 4pm. £30, includes entry
- Nearest station: Bond Street
More in the area in our Mayfair guide, and the rest of the season in our guide to London exhibitions.
