The Crawdaddy Club — the Rolling Stones' early residency

The Crawdaddy Club was run by Giorgio Gomelsky in the back room of the Station Hotel on Kew Road in Richmond, Surrey, beginning in 1963 — a weekly R&B night that became the Rolling Stones' first sustained residency and the venue that transformed them from a band with potential into a band with a following. Gomelsky had been planning to manage the Stones and became their de facto manager before Andrew Loog Oldham arrived and took the position formally; his contribution to establishing them in Richmond was real and largely unacknowledged.

The Crawdaddy shows were chaotic and physical — audiences who had never seen anything quite like the Stones' approach to American R&B, played at volume and with an abandon that the clubs of central London hadn't accommodated. The Beatles came to Richmond to see the Stones play in April 1963, while the Fab Four were still in the early flush of their own breakthrough. Lennon and McCartney stayed afterward; the exchange of mutual recognition between the two groups who would define British popular music in the 1960s took place in a pub back room in a Surrey commuter town.

The Station Hotel has since been renamed and the building has changed use multiple times. The Crawdaddy residency lasted only a matter of months before the Stones were pulled into the machinery of national success — Oldham, Decca, the first single — and needed no further development in a pub in Richmond. A local heritage plaque acknowledges the Crawdaddy Club's existence on what is now part of the Richmond Athletic Association ground.