London’s Lost Music Venues

The most depressing thing about Paul Talling’s new book, London’s Lost Music Venues, is that this is the second volume. The first volume featured on club-sized venues, including the likes of the Marquee, 12 Bar, Bull & Gate and the Cartoon in Croydon – there’s a full list here – while volume two takes in some of the larger theatres as well as smaller clubs that didn’t feature in the first volume and others that have closed since it was published – the list is here.

Talling is the creator of Derelict London, which was one of the great early London blogs and remains popular today. It features photographs of London buildings that the bulldozers had left behind: abandoned houses and factories, decrepit churches, empty shops and forgotten cinemas. There was something about this skeletal remains – boarded up doors, faded graffiti, floor strewn with rubbish, ivy and buddleia sprouting through the brickwork – that drew people’s attention. A couple of books followed, as did walking tours; Paul writes about the history of the blog here.

It’s always amazing to see how rapidly a building can descend into ruin once it’s left alone. The rot might take a while to set in, but as soon as it does the decline is fast – it literally seems to decompose before your eyes. Most of the venues in London’s Lost Music Venues haven’t quite reached that point however; they have either been demolished outright or given different uses. As well as great London venues such as the Astoria, Earls Court, and Borderline, there are the two big music shops at either end of Oxford Street, HMV and Virgin, both of which hosted in-store performances.

I’ve often pondered the absence of theatre-sized venues in central London since the demise of the Astoria as I knew the likes of the Lyceum and the Saville – although I’d never clocked that the Saville was located in what is now the rather dismal Odeon Covent Garden on the deadest part of Shaftesbury Avenue. But it’s some of the outer London venues that really resonate, such as Hobbit’s Garden, a club located in William Morris House in Wimbledon that hosted Roxy Music and Genesis before switching to hardcore punk in the late 80s, or the Acid Palace in Uxbridge, where Uriah Heep, Wishbone Ash and Audience all played in thee later 60s.

Then there are all the decent-sized venues – the ballrooms, local theatres and cinemas – that hosted live music through much of the 60s and 70s. Think of the Assembly Rooms in Surbiton, which hosted Black Sabbath and The Fall, or the Orchid Ballroom in Purley, where The Who, Small Faces, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder and Slade all played at some time. Such spaces are now almost impossible to conceive. Sadly, a third volume feels almost inevitable.