The V&A’s Lost Music Venues: A celebration of the grassroots spaces that sustain British music culture

The V&A’s Lost Music Venues display is part eulogy, part call to action and part cultural archive-in-the-making, curator Harriet Reed tells us.

A labyrinth of tapestries and chalices, the V&A Museum isn’t where you’d expect to find a pair of scuzzy toilet cubicles that look straight out of a Camden basement circa 2004. But a new display, Lost Music Venues, rightly champions grassroots and independent music venues as integral to culture and design.

Teeming with musical ephemera, from flyers and setlists to tickets and clothes, the display also contains artefacts from long-shuttered venues and ones still open: a disco ball from St Albans’ Pioneer Club, the Astoria’s red neon signage, a pager that monitored sound levels at the Haçienda. Familiar spaces are attentively recreated, from the graffiti-clad loos to a ticket desk accompanied by the sound of muffled music from within. Lost Music Venues is partly a love letter to those directly involved in the live music scene, but, as curator Harriet Reed says, “every single person has a favourite venue. I had colleagues working on 18th-century ceramics who would say ‘I hope you’ve got the Hammersmith Clarendon in there.’”

Music venues have been the lifeblood of the industry since the 1950s, but the charity Music Venue Trust (MVT) reports that 53 percent of UK venues failed to turn a profit in 2025. In the last seven years, 11,000 venues have closed. A recent casualty is The White Hotel in Salford, an MOT garage turned experimental arts club, though it isn’t shutting for the usual reasons – licensing, policing, urban redevelopment, economic crises, technological change – but because it sits in a flood-risk zone. Lost Music Venues salutes such fallen giants, while cherishing the stages, basements, and pub backrooms of today and tomorrow.

What was the spark behind Lost Music Venues?

After the Covid lockdown, I was concerned about the venues I love: that real threat, the loss of those spaces. Then, in 2021, I acquired some posters by Raissa Pardini, who is the graphic designer for the display. She’s really the heart of the whole project. She had a small exhibition at The Social, which also sparked the idea – particularly because it’s also a story of design.

What was the significance of having this kind of display at the V&A?

Music is a huge part of our collection, our programming and our investment as a museum and as an institution. We are the national collection for performing arts. We’ve just opened the David Bowie Centre and The Music Is Black at V&A East. So it was important for us to engage with this issue and with an industry we hadn’t built a strong, meaningful relationship with. But the display is about the cultural significance of these spaces. It’s not just about, this is where Oasis played their first gig. It’s about the wider ecology: the people who design the posters and the flyers, the sound engineers, the lighting designers, the roadies, the promoters, the managers, the bar staff, the security. It’s a people story. For the V&A, as a design museum, as a representation of the creative industries in the UK, you can’t tell that story without talking about grassroots music venues, because they are the incubator for that talent. So it felt like the right home.

How did you begin to tell that story?

It was a big ask. We classify it as a display and not an exhibition in V&A terminology, because, compared to our big blockbusters, it’s a fraction of the size and it’s also free. But I wanted it to still feel epic, because it’s an epic story, and we wanted a national representation across several decades. It was challenging to think about it in those terms, knowing that so many venues weren’t going to make the cut. But we needed to focus on stories of creativity and resilience that spread across genres and place. So within the club section, Belfast Art College is there to talk about bridging the political divide. Sister Friction is there to talk about visibility and inclusion for the LGBTQ community. Lots of venues also tell those stories, but it was about finding the right material.

You asked the MVT and the wider industry for material. How did that guide the curation?

We tried to keep it relatively contained, because if the callout went national, it would have been overwhelming! We already had an idea of the venues and the places we wanted to include, but then we received all these submissions that helped direct the story, because when someone’s offered you something amazing, you have to include it. The more people that heard about the callout, the more who emailed to say, “I hope you mentioned this place”, and it would set us off on a new tangent of research because it was somewhere we hadn’t thought about yet.

The display has been put together with a genuine love for the grassroots scene. How did you achieve that?

We worked with an amazing design team who all already had relationships with the music industry. Some of them were in bands, some used to manage bands. Everyone felt really passionate about it. All of the detail in the design is researched, but it’s lived experience. They wanted it to feel authentic but ambiguous enough that it wasn’t paying homage to a specific venue, that it could be any place a visitor might have gone to.

What do you think is the most significant threat to grassroots music venues right now?

From the MVT’s annual report, it seems like things have stabilised a little bit since the pandemic, but we’re not in a stable place. The cost of living crisis is still affecting a lot of venues. I think the financial challenges are probably the biggest that are faced, but you still have issues with redevelopment, councils, noise complaints.

The UK has lost roughly five venues a day since 2019. Are we losing too much culture in one go? Or does culture need to shed its skin to move forward?

It’s a bit of both, isn’t it? With every cultural evolution or renewal, you see spaces and scenes and sounds crest: the wave crests and it withdraws over time. It’s very rare for a venue to stay open for several decades. As a museum, our challenge is to document those scenes and spaces, and understand when and why things change. Part of the drive behind the callout was to include venues that are open today. I wanted it to be an opportunity to look at those spaces now, because you don’t know how long certain scenes will last. Part of our responsibility and remit is to capture the cultural climate at the time. Even if something is burning brightly for a short period, it’s still worth capturing. We can’t predict the most significant cultural venue in five, ten, 50 years’ time. We can research and use our own intuition and curatorial instinct. But I don’t think we’re losing culture. I think it’s adapting. We’re in a huge period of transition.

How has that period of transition affected your work as a curator and documentor of culture?

This display has been an attempt to capture that, to think about it and not stop thinking about it. Part of the callout was about establishing a new archive collection for grassroots music venues. Popular culture and music generally is much more embedded into heritage than it was 15 years ago. You’ve got the British Pop Archive in Manchester. The London Museum did an exhibition on grime and one on soundsystem culture. The Music Is Black talks about the Blue Note and the Four Aces. These stories of venues are embedded in a lot of other shows. But the aim of the display isn’t to create more displays, although that cultural recognition means a lot to MVT and to us. I would like there to be more venues or nights or collectives or promoters coming out of the project, rather than more shows about the spaces.

The White Hotel’s founders feel the venue’s spirit will prevail long after it’s gone. There are venues flourishing everywhere. For example, The Social in London just had its late licence extended. Do you share a similar optimism?

We talked to a lot of people, from venue owners and the MVT board to practitioners, musicians, collectives and academics. Coming out of those conversations, we didn’t want the display to feel negative, because there is still a thriving sector. Obviously this isn’t the case with all venues, but there is a cultural cycle that often happens with scenes. Sometimes, as with The White Hotel, they go on to do something amazing and that spirit is never lost. Scenes pop up and have a natural shelf life. That’s not to diminish the real fight that venues have to stay open. We’re still dealing with the onslaught of the pandemic; I don’t think we’re out of that. But I feel cautiously optimistic about the future. One of the most interesting things from the MVT’s annual report was the way they class the purposes of venues, their remit and programming, because more and more venues class themselves as spaces for music and art and yoga and young people. It’s a way for them to be financially resilient. They’re becoming increasingly multidisciplinary and filling a gap that’s been left by the closure of youth centres. It’s changing rapidly, but diversity of venues is a healthy sign of a strong sector. If we can keep those dark, gritty basements as well as those brighter educational spaces, I think we’ll be in good shape.