Taking the family across the pond to London in early April and would like to visit some Stones sites. Anyone have any recommendations? Thank you in advance.

As a side note.....very proud to be an American today. Again, thank you.

Theres a shop in Denmark Street where they used to record.

Go to the Hard Rock cafe shop and get the tour of "The Vault".
If you like rock, you need to go there!
Also alot of Stones stuff there.
Read about it at hard rock cafes homepage.
It was the undisputed highlight of my trip to london!

-TomR

Quote
fishstix
Taking the family across the pond to London in early April and would like to visit some Stones sites. Anyone have any recommendations? Thank you in advance.

[home.comcast.net]

Quote
Gazza

Quote
fishstix
Taking the family across the pond to London in early April and would like to visit some Stones sites. Anyone have any recommendations? Thank you in advance.

[home.comcast.net]

and for a small fee (payable in liquid form), you offer personally-guided tours, I think?

Of course, although I can't vouch for their accuracy.

Quote
tomremi
Go to the Hard Rock cafe shop and get the tour of "The Vault".
If you like rock, you need to go there!
Also alot of Stones stuff there.
Read about it at hard rock cafes homepage.
It was the undisputed highlight of my trip to london!

-TomR

Yeah man, the Hard Rock across from Hyde Park is great. The Vault is a must see if you like Rock Music. There not only Rolling Stones stuff there but some really priceless gems there. Definitely worth the price of admission. Denmark Street is a fabulous place to visit if you are a musician. There are a couple of shops that will leave you drooling. They have the "REAL DEAL" original instruments. I almost passed out at some of the vintage stuff they had on that street. It's really cool because there are at least ten shops clustered together. I think the place where the recording studio was is being renovated (at least as of last summer). There are a couple of the old clubs still around most have been torn down or turned into something else. Of course the Royal Albert Hall is still there in all it's glory. Good God what a cool place! Oh yeah, if you are in to recent places they played, the 100 Club on Oxford street is cool. It's really small but a ton of history was made there. Taking the tube is the best way to getting to most of the sights.

Ah... London in the Spring, Summer, Winter or Fall.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-01-21 00:45 by CBII.

Quote
Sir Craven of Cottage
Theres a shop in Denmark Street where they used to record.

I think thats Regent Studios isnt it?

Was in it a couple of years ago. Was amazed how small it was.

Good times, bad times
Next week the Rolling Stones play what could be their farewell to London. Just two miles - and 43 years - from where it all began at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond. Dominic Sandbrook charts the long love affair between the
band and the swinging city that launched them When the Rolling Stones make their much-anticipated return to the London stage later this month, it will surely be their farewell to the city in which it all began for them, back in the dreary black-and-white world of the early 1960s. London calling: The Rolling Stones in their heyday For despite their enormous international popularity and long absences abroad, the Stones are still Londoners at heart. The capital is their city, just as Vienna and Salzburg belonged to Mozart, or Los Angeles to the Beach Boys, or - not that locals would ever let you forget it - Liverpool to their great rivals, the Beatles. London always played a vital role in the Rolling Stones' story. Of the original five members, only Brian Jones hailed from outside the South East, and he moved down from Cheltenham as soon as he could. His colleagues were all London lads. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards both grew up in Dartford, Bill Wyman was born in Penge and Charlie Watts was an Islington boy. And appropriately enough in an age of urban sprawl, the iconic moments in the Stones' history are scattered across the landscape of Greater London. Mick and Keith first met at Dartford station; they auditioned for Jones's band in Soho; they built up their first following in Richmond; and they made their homes in Chelsea and Marylebone. But the city was more than a convenient backdrop. The Stones were a product of a distinctive place and time: London in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a city that seemed barely altered since the days of wartime and rationing. This was a world of greasy chop-houses, grubby hotels and Lyons teashops, where the shops stayed shut on Sundays and dining out meant a trip to the nearest Angus Steak House. Yet it was also the heart of a vibrant new youth culture built around education and affluence, a world of coffee bars, scooters and blues records, in which thousands of teenagers dreamed of emulating their American heroes. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were just the lucky ones. Four decades on, affluence, immigration and innovation have brought enormous changes to the city where it all began. But underneath the shiny veneer, the Rolling Stones' home town is still there in all its shabby charm. We rarely think of London as having a specific musical heritage, but if you listen carefully to the Stones' greatest albums, there it is: a distinctly English blend, ambition and aggression tempered with a hint of irony, boundless self-confidence jostling with withering cynicism. Rock 'n' roll may be an American art form, but how glorious that its greatest exponents hail from England's irrepressible capital Mick Jagger with Marianne Faithfull, after his run-in with the law
1 Dartford railway station might not sound an historic birthplace, but it was here, one rainy Tuesday morning in October 1961, that the Rolling Stones began their epic journey. Shivering on the platform as he waited for the train to Sidcup, 17-year-old art student Keith Richards spotted the vaguely familiar face of 'Mike' Jagger, an old primary school classmate then studying economics at the LSE. The two had not seen each other for years, but as they started chatting, Keith noticed that Mike was carrying some American blues records. As his train rolled in, Mike explained that he rehearsed with his friends in the privacy of their bedrooms. Would Keith like to join them? Of course he
would, and that night, when he arrived home, Keith rushed to tell his mother the news.
2 In May 1962, the young blues enthusiast Brian Jones placed an advertisement in Jazz News for four like-minded musicians. Auditions were held in the back room at the Bricklayer's Arms, 7 Broadwick Street, a suitably seedy venue in what was then a defiantly run-down corner of Soho. The first recruit was Ian Stewart, a lugubrious jazz pianist from Scotland, but over the next few days aspiring bluesmen Mick Jagger and Keith Richards also drifted into the grubby back room. It was at the pub that the group first practised together, meeting there three times a week at seven o'cloc to work on the chords that would make them famous.
3 For jazz and blues fans in the early 1960s, the Marquee Club at 165 Oxford Street offered paradise. Located in a squat, dark basement beneath the Academy Cinema - now a branch of the Abbey National - the club hosted Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated on Thursday nights. On July 12, 1962, however, Korner was scheduled to appear on BBC radio's Jazz Club, so Brian Jones' new group got their first break. Pushed to come up with a name, Jones settled on 'The Rolling Stones', even though most of his comrades disliked it. 'I hope they don't think we're a rock 'n' roll outfit,' Jagger told Jazz News the night before the gig. But the audience recognised fellow blues fanatics when they saw them, and the concert was a triumph.
4 These days, Edith Grove, Chelsea, just a stone's throw from the King's Road, is a distinctly upmarket address. But in the late summer of 1962, when Jagger, Richards and Jones moved into two rooms at No 102, it was the heart of cheap bed-sitter land. The flat was almost stereotypically awful, its walls soaked with damp, its curtains smeared with dirt, its furniture coated with dust. When the band's new bass player Bill Wyman visited the flat in December, he thought it 'looked like it was bomb-damaged … piled high with dirty dishes, and filth everywhere'. The walls were streaked with spittle, while the communal toilet had been wired for sound so that the boys could amuse themselves by playing back their guests' ablutions. Swinging London it wasn't.
5 The impoverished Rolling Stones made their breakthrough in February 1963, when they played at the Crawdaddy Club in the Station Hotel, Richmond (now a nightclub). The club was run by Giorgio Gomelsky, a black-bearded
Georgian jazz connoisseur who put on blues performances every Saturday night. 'I didn't know whether to laugh at the Stones or call for an animal trainer,' said one watching promoter. But West London was a blues heartland, and every weekend, 300 fans poured across the road from the station into the mirror-lined back room of the Victorian pub. One night the Stones noticed four shadowy figures slipping into the audience. The Beatles had come to check out the competition.
6 The London School of Economics is perhaps the capital's most prestigious academic institution. It was here that Mick Jagger was registered as a student. A bright boy who passed his 11-plus, he was recommended by his school headmaster as 'a lad of good general character, though he has been rather slow to mature'. But once in London, Jagger was more interested in cadences than in Keynesian economics. 'I have been offered a really excellent opportunity in the entertainment world,' he wrote to the LSE in September 1963, explaining his decision to drop out. The school reassured him that he could always come back if the music didn't work out. The LSE's website still refers proudly to 'Sir Mick', its most famous alumnus.
7 Late on the evening of March 18, 1965, the band's chauffeur-driven Daimler pulled into the forecourt of the Francis service station on the Romford Road in Stratford, East London. To the horror of the manager, Charles Keeley, 'a shaggy-haired monster' got out and asked 'in disgusting language' if he could use the toilet. Keeley refused, to which Mick Jagger replied: 'We piss anywhere, man.' Jagger, Jones and Wyman then relieved themselves on the forecourt wall. Keeley called in his lawyers, and the Stones were convicted of breaching the peace. According to the magistrate, they were 'complete morons' who 'wear their hair down to their shoulders, wear filthy clothes and act like
clowns'. Their teenage fans loved it.
8 Flats in Harley House, Marylebone Road now sell for more than £2 millio each; in 1966, Jagger paid just £50 a week for his rooms in this ornate Victorian mansion block. For the Austin Powers of his day, it was the perfect bachelor pad, stuffed with gilded mirrors, Chinese crockery and expensive hi-fi equipment. Jagger was hailed by the press as 'the most fashionable, modish man in London, the voice of today'. Harley House was ideal for a pop star who moved in aristocratic circles. As his girlfriend Marianne Faithfull put it, Jagger could never resist a dinner 'given by any silly thing with a title and a castle.'
9 The Rolling Stones were one of the first bands to record at Olympic Studios, 117 Church Road, Barnes. Built in 1906 as a public hall, the complex was converted into recording studios in the early Sixties, and in 1966 the Stones gathered there to work on Between the Buttons, their fifth album. They liked it so much that they used it for their next five albums, from the psychedelic whimsy of Their Satanic Majesties Request to the raw aggression of Sticky Fingers, and the studios remained a reassuring bolthole throughout the turbulence of the late Sixties. But by 1971, hit by enormous tax bills, the Stones had gone into exile on the French Riviera, where they converted Keith Richards' villa into a huge makeshift studio.
10 One of the most notorious prisons in Britain, Wormwood Scrubs became indelibly associated with the Rolling Stones on June 29, 1967, when Keith Richards spent the night behind bars after his conviction in the Redlands drugs trial (Jagger spent the night at Brixton prison in south London). Richards, Jagger and the fashionable art dealer Robert Fraser had been found guilty of drugs offences after the police raided Richards' Sussex retreat and the trial confirmed the Stones's notoriety. 'We are not old men,' Richards replied when asked why Marianne Faithfull had been clad only in a fur rug. 'We are not worried about petty morals.' Richards and Jagger were released on bail within 24 hours and their sentences were quashed on appeal.
11 In March 1967, Keith Richards spent a few nights at Brian Jones' expensive mansion flat at 1 Courtfield Road, Kensington, from where they were due to drive to Morocco on holiday. Jones was now living in lavish dissolution with the Italian model Anita Pallenberg, and the couple had decorated the flat in the latest North African fabrics and intoxicating hippy colours. But the holiday was a disaster. Jones had a breakdown, Richards and Pallenberg started an affair, and Brian returned alone to the whisky bottles and train sets of his Kensington flat. Ostracised by his old friends, he complained: 'They took my music; they took my band; and now they've taken my love.' He became reliant on drink and drugs. He fled to the countryside, and in May 1969 he was sacked from the band he had founded.
12 Hyde Park hosted the Stones' last big London appearance of the Sixties, an open-air concert in July 1969. The free concert came just days after Brian Jones' death by drowning, and attracted huge publicity. Some 250,000
people gathered in the sunshine to eat ice cream, gambol in the park and listen to the band's first live appearance in a year. Every move the Stones made was tracked by six Granada TV crews. Mick Jagger wore lipstick, eyeshadow, a leather dog-collar and a white frilly dress, recited Shelley and released hundreds of white butterflies into the air. London's gardeners complained for weeks that the butterflies had horribly damaged their plants. The Rolling Stones play Twickenham Stadium on August 20 and 22. Dominic Sandbrook's 'Never Had It So Good, A History of Britain from the Suez to The Beatles' is published by Abacus, £9.99.

Quote
Gazza

Quote
Sir Craven of Cottage
Theres a shop in Denmark Street where they used to record.

I think thats Regent Studios isnt it?

Was in it a couple of years ago. Was amazed how small it was.

Indeed it is.....now called Regent Sounds.... [www.denmarkstreetonline.co.uk] well worth a browse around with some cool photos on the wall amongst all the guitars.

http://www.courthouse-hotel.com/history.html

History of the Courthouse Hotel
Set right in the heart of London’s bustling shopping and theatre district, the Courthouse Hotel offers a luxurious haven for those wishing to enjoy the best that the capital has to offer. A stone’s throw from Liberty’s and the shopping paradise of Bond Street, Regent Street and Carnaby Street, the hotel is in a prime location. Situated in an old courthouse, the Grade II listed building retains much of the splendour of the original, with a number of quirky features.

The Great Marlborough Street Magistrate’s Court set the scene for many famous cases over the years, which were either heard there or taken to full trial at Crown Courts such as the Old Bailey. This was the case with the first obscenity trial for a comic book in English history, against International Times in 1971. John Lennon’s sensational court case regarding the sale of sexually explicit lithograph drawings was thrown out on a technicality in 1970, and Mick Jagger spent time here defending his name when it was alleged he was caught in possession of cannabis (and Marianne Faithful!). Keith Richards received a £205 fine here in 1973 for possession of marijuana, heroin and mandrax, as well as a Smith and Wesson revolver and an antique shotgun, both held without a licence. Oscar Wilde also had the start of his ‘Queensbury’ case heard in the building.

Many remnants of this time have been incorporated into the building’s current scheme. Original Robert Adams fireplaces adorn some of the suites, and The Bar’s private tables are actually inside three of the original prison cells. Silk, the hotel’s destination restaurant, is the old Number One court where the Judges bench, witness stand and dock take centre stage. Elsewhere in the hotel, glimpses of former use can be seen – such as the iron bars that separate the lobby lounge from the Bar.

I have to agree with those mentioning The Hard Rock Cafe Vault.
There are lots of cool guitars down there. And the tourguide in the vault is such a cool storyteller. At the end of the tour through the vault he allows you to choose one of the instruments down there and you can take a picture.
As I play lefthanded guitar there was no other choice to take a picture with Jimi Hendrix's Gibson Flying V.


Here's another homepage with lots of music related tourist spots for London:
Shady old lady



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-01-21 14:13 by John1982.

i'll be in london this summer, albeit only for a couple of days....the only thing i'm deadset on doing is watching a show at ronnie scott's...couldn't get anyone to go with me in 2006...that place is hallowed ground...where jimi played his final notes....

Anyone know EXACTLY where the stage was set up in Hyde Park?