Black tie at the V&A on Thursday 8 October 2026: champagne in the Dome, private access to the Britain Galleries, dinner in the Raphael Court.
St John’s Hospice opened in St John’s Wood in 1984 with ten inpatient beds, added a day care unit in 1987, and has spent more than forty years providing palliative care across north and central London without charge to any patient. In 2024 the day unit reopened as the St John’s Wellbeing Centre after a three-million-pound refurbishment. The hospice takes only a fraction of its costs from the health service, so most of what it does is paid for by evenings like this one.
That is the arithmetic behind a charity gala, and the alternative to the ticket price is not a cheaper ticket but a smaller hospice. A bed in a hospice costs a great deal to keep open, and a night that raises several hundred thousand pounds keeps several of them open for a year.
The 2026 gala is at the V&A on Thursday 8 October, from 6.45 until eleven. Champagne is served under the Dome, the Britain Galleries open with the museum closed to everyone else, and dinner is in the Raphael Court beneath the seven surviving Raphael Cartoons. Tickets are £450 a head or £4,500 for a table of ten, black tie, with a luxury raffle and both a silent and a live auction. Private access to a room of that scale, on a night nobody can buy into, is the rarer half of what is on offer.