About Frontrow

Frontrow is a free, independent guide to what's on at UK theatres, concert halls, arts centres and studios. It exists because finding a play on a particular night in a particular town is still oddly hard: the listings are scattered across hundreds of individual box offices, and the aggregators that do exist tend to cover the West End and stop.

How it works

We read the public listings API that 130 UK venues already publish through their box-office system. Rolling import batches run twice daily; each schedule prints the successful-read time for the venue sources it uses. What you see is what the venue was selling when its source was read, including the parts that are inconvenient — a missing price, no published running time, an untagged performance.

Because we read performances rather than runs, we can keep detail that gets lost elsewhere: the specific night that is captioned, the specific night with a BSL interpreter, the estimated curtain-down time that decides whether you make the last train.

What we won't do

We don't sell tickets, take commission, accept paid placement, or write synopses the venue didn't write. Booking links go to the venue. If a venue publishes nothing for a field, the page says so. The coverage report spells out exactly how complete each field is and what is deliberately filtered out.

How Frontrow can support itself

Venue booking links are uncommissioned today. The commercial path is approved ticket-referral partnerships, clearly labelled sponsorship kept separate from the organic schedule, and optional venue feeds or tools under their own distribution agreements. An official venue route stays available, payment never changes the date-led order, and no commissioned link will go live without a visible disclosure.

Missing venue?

Coverage is source-led, so there are real gaps — most cinema chains and several large theatre groups aren't here yet. If your venue publishes open listings, tell us and we'll look at adding it.