Eel Pie Island — Richmond, London

Eel Pie Island is a small island in the Thames at Twickenham, accessible by footbridge, that housed one of the most important early rhythm and blues venues in Britain — the Eel Pie Island Hotel, which hosted the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, Long John Baldry, John Lee Hooker, and a young Rod Stewart, among many others, during the early 1960s British R&B boom. The hotel's ballroom became the venue for weekend dances that attracted the emerging R&B audience from across south and west London. The Stones played there multiple times in 1963 before their commercial breakthrough. Jimi Hendrix performed there in 1967.

The Eel Pie Island Hotel had a particular atmosphere — reached only by boat or footbridge, set on a narrow island in the Thames, with a reputation for bohemian looseness that made it different from conventional London venues. The building itself was ramshackle and eventually derelict; it served briefly as a hippie commune in the early 1970s before burning down in 1971. The fire, widely believed to have been deliberate, destroyed one of London's most historically significant music spaces. A second fire gutted the remaining structure in 1996.

Eel Pie Island is now a private residential community of artists and craftspeople, accessible to the public only on occasional open days. The footbridge from Twickenham embankment is the only access point and is generally closed to the public. The island's history as a music venue is documented in a small museum maintained by island residents. Various heritage accounts of the British R&B scene identify it as one of the foundational locations where British musicians encountered American blues and began to transform it into something distinctively their own.