Originally an organist, Wood studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London, from 1886. In 1889 he toured as a conductor with the Arthur Rousbey Opera Company and later appeared with other opera companies. In 1894 he helped to organize a series of Wagner concerts at the Queen's Hall, London, and on Oct. 6, 1895, established there a nightly season of Promenade Concerts. The success of the annual season of these concerts (the “Proms”) had a wide influence on English musical life. Beginning with a popular repertory, Wood systematically broadened the appeal of his concerts to include the entire range of 18th- and 19th-century orchestral music. Later he introduced the works of prominent contemporary figures, among them Richard Strauss, Debussy, and Schoenberg. The Promenade Concerts were managed from 1927 by the British Broadcasting Corporation and after the destruction of the Queen's Hall in World War II were transferred to the Royal Albert Hall. In 1898 Wood married the Russian singer Olga Urusova, who had been his pupil; after her death he married, in 1911, Muriel Greatorex.

He published a mass, songs, arrangements of works of Handel and Purcell, an orchestral arrangement of a toccata and fugue of J.S. Bach (which appeared under the pseudonym Paul Klenovsky), and the books The Gentle Art of Singing, 4 vol. (1927–28), My Life of Music (1938), and About Conducting (1945). Wood was knighted in 1911.