Britannia Row Studios — Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd established Britannia Row Studios at 35 Britannia Row in Islington following the completion of Wish You Were Here in 1975, converting a three-storey building into a private recording facility designed to their specifications. The studio gave the band complete creative and commercial independence, and the first albums made there — Animals in 1977 and The Wall in 1979 — represent the peak of their creative and commercial powers. Animals, with its Orwellian allegory and guitar-driven fury, was recorded immediately after the studio opened; The Wall, with its operatic scale and Roger Waters's autobiographical rage, was the project that both perfected and destroyed the band as a functioning unit.

The choice of Islington — a working-class borough north of the City of London, in a street of Victorian terraces — was characteristic of Pink Floyd's approach to their career: practical, private, and disconnected from the music industry's geographical clichés. The studio was also a commercial operation, and Britannia Row built a reputation as a professional facility beyond the band's own use. It operated at the Islington address until 1995, when it relocated to Wandsworth.

The building at 35 Britannia Row has subsequently been used for other purposes, including as a facility of the London School of Sound. The studio's history is well documented in the extensive literature on Pink Floyd, and the Islington address is visited by fans completing the band's London geography. The Wall, recorded partly at Britannia Row and partly at Superbear Studios in France, was the band's largest commercial success and the work that most completely embodied both Roger Waters's ambitions and the contradictions that would fracture Pink Floyd permanently.