Crawdaddy Club — Rolling Stones Residency, Richmond

The Crawdaddy Club began as a Sunday night residency at the Station Hotel pub in Richmond in 1963, run by promoter Giorgio Gomelsky, and became the venue where the Rolling Stones built the audience and the reputation that launched their career. The Stones played the Crawdaddy from February 1963, and word spread rapidly through the south and west London music scene that something extraordinary was happening on Sunday nights in Richmond. The Beatles attended a Stones performance at the Crawdaddy in April 1963 — one of the seminal rock encounters, the two bands in a room together at the moment both were on the verge of national fame.

The Crawdaddy later moved to the Richmond Athletic Ground on Kew Road, where larger crowds could be accommodated. The club was central to the British R&B revival — a movement of young white musicians who had absorbed American blues records and were performing that music with enormous enthusiasm for audiences who shared their obsession. The Yardbirds, who would later feature Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page in succession, also played the Crawdaddy, and the club was the primary incubator of the south London blues scene that would generate so much of what became 1960s British rock.

The Station Hotel in Richmond, where the Stones first played the Crawdaddy, still stands on the corner of The Quadrant and Kew Road and has a blue plaque acknowledging the club's history. The Richmond Athletic Ground also still operates. Richmond is accessible from central London by District line and is a pleasant riverside town with a strong heritage connection to the early Rolling Stones story.