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London's stages and concert rooms: the West End houses and the playhouses that make their own shows, the grand halls, the churches with a musical life, the jazz basements, the comedy clubs, the clubs proper, and the rooms above pubs where things start. What is on is listed under each venue, and in What's On.
What is on at them this week is in What's On: Performance
A Victorian engine shed in the round, where the audience stands under a ring of iron columns.
GigsWorth it for the building
Also in Architecture.
It was built in 1847 as the Great Circular Engine House for the London and Birmingham Railway — a turntable shed for locomotives, designed by Robert Dockray with Robert Stephenson and put up by Branson and Gwyther. Engines outgrew it within a decade and it spent a century as a gin warehouse. It reopened as an arts space in 1966 and the 1960s counterculture more or less moved in; it closed again, derelict, and came back in 2006 after a rebuild that left the twenty-four cast-iron columns and the conical roof exactly where they were.
The room is a circle, which is unusual and changes the gig: there is no bad angle and no obvious back. The programme runs from touring bands to circus and spoken word, and a large part of the building is given over to studios where eleven- to twenty-five-year-olds work for free.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.