But this isn't all that makes the place feel like a church - there's the congregation. Or the audience, to be more precise - but to those who attend the place less often, they are in many ways more like a congregation, in the reverence of their attention and their easy familiarity with the sacred texts, in the coherence that comes from having so many sitting week by week in their regular pews. It's not that the Wigmore sets out to be exclusive - it would far rather not be. But there are very few ways of cramming a potential audience that might run to 1,000 or more into a hall built for 600. That's why so many of the events are already sold out.
All seats sold, returns only.
There is no alternative - the place has often gone though hard times and needs this kind of regular additional money. And you can't knock it down and build something bigger since that would destroy both its intimacy and its sense of history, which are two of its particular joys. It wasn't always like this. And it wasn't always the Wigmore. And so it remained until the first world war, when clamour brewed up against all things German, and the property was removed from the Bechsteins on the grounds that under their ownership it was simply a device for selling German goods to the British.