Water Rats Pub — London

The Water Rats at 328 Grays Inn Road in King's Cross is one of the most historically significant music venues in London — a pub with a music room that has hosted some of the most important early performances in British rock history. Bob Dylan performed his first UK gig here in December 1962, when the venue was known as the King's Cross Cinema and subsequently the Pindar of Wakefield. The Pogues, who were closely associated with the King's Cross area in their early years, played the Water Rats on numerous occasions. Oasis performed what was reportedly their first London gig here in 1993.

The venue's combination of an intimate pub atmosphere, a dedicated music space, and its location in a working-class London district made it a natural home for folk, punk, and indie acts who needed to build an audience outside the mainstream circuit. The King's Cross area in the 1980s — rough, transitional, with a significant Irish community — was natural territory for the Pogues, whose music drew on Irish traditional forms and urban London experience simultaneously. Shane MacGowan and the band were regulars in the neighbourhood pubs and venues.

The Water Rats continues to operate as a live music venue and pub. The music room holds approximately 200 people and hosts regular shows by established and emerging artists. It is a working venue rather than a museum, and its continued operation is part of what makes it significant: the tradition of live music in a pub setting that it represents stretches from folk clubs through punk and indie to the present. It is a short walk from King's Cross St Pancras station.