Jazz at The 100 Club:
Bringing History to Life

We will now take a quick break from our walkthrough history of jazz to introduce you to our 'Jazz at The 100 Club' exhibition. The Jazz Centre UK celebrates the work and role of the 100 Club in jazz history. We want to share its unique legacy and importance with a whole new generation of jazz musicians and audiences. This large project is funded by our second National Lottery Heritage Grant of £94,800 and started July 2019. Have a walk around the exhibit and visit our touchscreen to get an overview of the expansive headings of this great project.

The 100 Club - based at 100 Oxford Street London - is the oldest continuously-running music venue in the world. So when, in 2019, the National Lottery Heritage Fund offered us the opportunity to conduct a project celebrating the club we were both delighted and excited! Opened in 1942 the club began as London's most famous jazz venue and, under various titles, has continued as such showcasing hundreds of British and American jazz and blues stars for a total of seventy years.  The rock boom of the 1960s however quickly and radically modified the club's booking policies to include regular appearances by The Kinks, The Who, the Rolling Stones and other now-legendary Rock icons, and later in the 1970s the club became a bauhaus for punk (the Sex Pistols were regular visitors), reggae and progressively grunge, grime and rap until today when the club has morphed into the most important grass-roots music venue in London. Most remarkably of all, in 2019, it was officially nominated (by the Ecclesiastics Insurance group) as one of the most important cultural venues in the UK (others included Jane Austen's home, Abbey Road Studios and Shakespeare's birthplace!).  And therefore it was no surprise when the 100 Club was  accorded full charitable status by Westminster City Council; the first time this has happened to any such venue in the world.

Click the button below to learn more about our ‘Jazz at The 100 Club’ project on our website.