Soho Poly: The bizarre history of Pink Floyd’s old rehearsal space

Posted On February 3, 2025February 3, 2025

There is a common misconception that music begins and ends with the artist, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. The history of music is not a straight line but a haphazard mess of turning cogs. One cog attaches to one, five, or ten more, and it plays a pivotal role in keeping everything spinning. Remove one cog, and others fall. Some are less significant than others, but they all contribute to what we recognise as the modern music industry.

Please entertain this metaphor a little longer. The Beatles are a big cog, and if you were to remove them, then other spinning wheels they contributed towards, such as The Rolling Stones, Dave Clark Five and the British Invasion as a whole, would also stop turning. But the wheels aren’t just made up of bands and artists; they are a collection of rooms, speaker systems, students with recording equipment, and happenstance. One space that represents all of these factors is Soho Poly, a small basement venue in Central London which has a rich history contributing towards the creation of artists, both by having them in the space and helping them propel their careers elsewhere.

Music is built into the foundation of this space, as before it was even recognised as a potential venue, it was used as an arts space where bands would go to create posters that could promote their gigs. “This arts workshop was during a time when student unions were much more dynamic than they are now,” said Guy Osborn, one of the people responsible for running the venue currently, “It’s a very intimate space, it’s downstairs, a lot of people say it’s like going down into a basement. It’s not the size of the 100 Club, it holds 60 people, it’s a little venue.”

He continued: “In that space, they will have been doing screen-printing for the posters for the bigger gigs that were going on. There was quite a famous venue called The Polytechnic at the time, which, if you were going to countercultural stuff in the late ‘60s, you’d be going there, The Roundhouse or the UFO Club. Soho Poly is the venue where they made a lot of the posters for stuff like that.”

It wasn’t often that gigs would happen in the Soho Poly during this period. The room’s acoustics were good, and because it’s such a small, intimate space, a folk group would meet to perform. Additionally, some bands used it as a rehearsal space, including (possibly) Pink Floyd, although details about what they were doing in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s are, respectfully, unreliable. That being said, there is a photo in an early Pink Floyd biography that looks like the band playing in the SOHO Poly.

“I took Nick Mason down there. I teach in the law school next door, and we got Nick Mason to come in to talk about the evolution of his contract from 1966 to 2015, or 16, with the head of Warners,” said Osborn, “On the way there, I said, ‘We’ve got this photo that’s in a book about early Pink Floyd, and it looks like the room’, so I took him down. Whether that’s the actual photo in that room or whether he’s lost in the midst of time, who knows, but two members of Pink Floyd were students. Nick Mason and Roger Waters were students in architecture, and given that room was the arts space, they’ll have definitely been in that room, even if that photo was not taken there.” 

Before it truly found its feet as a music venue, the space was adapted in the ‘70s to accommodate local theatre groups. Taking advantage of the central location, excellent acoustics, and welcoming space, people would gather to rehearse plays, watch performances, and meet other theatre lovers.

“It wasn’t known as the Soho Poly then, it was part of the polytechnic building. And then in 1972, there was a theatre company, Soho Theatre, and they did a deal with the polytechnic to create a theatre club, and that became the Soho Poly Theatre Club,” said Matthew Morrison, who also helps run the current venue with Guy, “So, the venue became known as the Soho Poly, and for about 20 years it was where a lot of really big names in theatre made their name.”

He continued: “People like Hanif Kureishi had his first play down there. Big actors like Simon Callow, Harriet Walter, playwrights like Caryl Churchill and Timberlake Wertembaker, they all had really early material there. Bob Hoskins famously wrote a play for it, which is where he met the people that came together for The Long Good Friday. So it was this really significant but tiny space.” 

Despite being such a significant space, it was slowly being forgotten. When Matt discovered the number of people who had used the Soho Poly and formed the basis of their careers there, the club was disbanded, and the room was being used as a glorified storage cupboard. When Morrison and Osborn discovered the rich history of both music and theatre built into the foundation of Soho Poly, they decided it was only right to restore it and get it up and running again. 

“In 1990 the theatre stopped, and the space was left completely abandoned, it just became a junk room, and all this history, all this legacy was just completely lost. In about 2010, 2012, I started initiating and Guy came on board,” said Morrison, “This venue has all this history, and it’s lying completely dormant in the centre of London, what a waste. So, we’ve spent the last ten years trying to bring it back.”

That restoration has been more than just getting rid of junk and putting on shows again, though. Morrison and Osborn have dug into the history of Soho Poly to find out what it was about the space that sparked so much creativity. When you look at the number of spinning wheels that veer from this cog, both in the worlds of theatre and music, there are far too many people who relied on the space for it to be pure coincidence.

“It was always known as a friendly venue, a really inclusive walled space,” said Morrison, “So, for example, we repainted the walls to reflect the fact that it was painted brown in the ‘70s because brown felt more inclusive than black because black was viewed as cold and osterie. So, we’ve done quite a lot to honour that early history and make it the sort of venue we want it to be.”

He continued, “Another thing is they did loads of events in the lunchtime, and one of the reasons for that is because of the audience, you got people, particularly women who had to do childcare, that was the expectation in the ‘70s and ‘80s, they could get involved. So, one of the things we’ve always done is we’re really keen on this idea that we reach different people if we mess around with the time of the performance.”

Thanks to old recordings sourced by the team, when the space was reopened as a venue, Matt and Guy were always confident it would sound good, but even they weren’t expecting the punch that the small space packs. “We’d sourced a lot of bootleg gigs […] We got a sense even from that, I mean, it was recorded by an engineering student who was good at sound recording for the time, so we got a sense from that that it would probably be alright,” said Osborn, “But then, there’s been a few jaw-dropping moments when we’ve gone, ‘Christ, I never knew it would be this good’.”

Reeling off highlights quickly, Osborn recalls, “I mean, Martin Stephenson was the first person to play. He played with a violinist, or a fiddler, and an acoustic guitar, and we did that very basically, and we thought, ‘We’re on to something here’.” He said, “Then we had a number of other shows when we had different types of music. We first had a drum kit in when David Callahan played […] we thought ‘Even with drums this is sounding good’. Then we had a band from Liverpool called Beat House play last year doing their debut London show, and that was when we thought, ‘Christ, this is really something’. It sounded like a post-modern Portishead or something like that, it was a really beautiful sound. So, we have been really stunned by it.”

While the room may have a rich history, Osborn and Morrison are keen on this not just being an archival space. Their involvement with Independent Venue Week, along with the variety of shows they put on throughout the year, emphasise that they’re keen on the space harvesting new talent for future generations as well as honouring the people who have passed through here. Time moves on, but the importance of these venues persists, as the memories people make in there remain, and the love of music and theatre experienced doesn’t have an expiry date.

Osborn and Morrison found this out for themselves. One of the people who videoed those early bootleg gigs went for a look around the space and was immediately transported back to the ‘60s and ‘70s the second he walked through the door.

“The guy who recorded that, he had aphasia, problems with his memory, but when he came down back into the space, we invited him back, those memories of recording those gigs started to flow back,” said Morrison, “It was this really lovely moment just where reconnecting with the place reenacted these memories for him.”

Osborn added, “He’d warned us that he’d had three or four mini strokes and he wasn’t very eloquent, the moment he stepped into that room for the first time in 30 or 40 years, and like Matt says, he was telling us stories about Syd Barrett down there and all sorts of stuff […] He was telling us about the recording process and who went there, some not very PC things as well to be completely honest […] but as Matt said, it was almost therapeutic for him.”

Those walls and that tiny space set the foundation for decades of art. The space is a cog, and it once turned, spurning the talents of many who have had an impact in music and theatre. Now, it has been dusted off and duplicated, placed back into the music machine at a different point, and is turning once again. Who knows what it will help spin in years to come?

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