Architecture

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Roundhouse

A railway engine shed of 1847 built round a turntable, obsolete in ten years and useful ever since.

IndustrialVictorian & EdwardianYou can go inside

Photo by Oxyman, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Also in Performance venues.

The London and North Western Railway put it up in 1846-47 as a roundhouse: a circular shed with a turntable in the middle and twenty-four bays radiating off it, so that a locomotive could be run in, spun and sent back out. Within a decade locomotives were too long to fit and it was finished as a railway building. Gilbey's the gin distillers then used it as a bonded warehouse for fifty years, and it fell empty before the war. In 1964 the playwright Arnold Wesker took it on for Centre 42 and it became the room the sixties happened in - the launch of International Times in 1966, one of only two British appearances by the Doors in 1968. The iron columns and the conical roof are all original.

Where
Chalk Farm Road, NW1 8EH
Nearest station
Chalk Farm · 2 min walk

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Open for performances, and for the occasional daytime tour.

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