Randomness Guide to London Menu

The Brixton Academy (officially, the Carling Academy Brixton) is a large music venue in Brixton, Originally built as a cinema in 1929, both the interior and exterior of the building are lavish Art Deco, and it is Grade 2 Listed.

The venue is very easy to find at night, since the distinctive entrance dome is picked out in bright green lights. The main stage can be seen from two areas: a lower floor which can hold up to 3,760 people, and an upper seated area. The total capacity for the venue is 4,921 according to their website. There are nine bars (including backstage), several of which are at the back of the main floor.

The cloakrooms charge £2 for each coat or bag; security is as friendly as it gets for a venue of this size. The bar staff will unfortunately insist on removing the lid from any water bottles they sell, and will claim that they're on camera the whole time and so couldn't slip you a lid even if they wanted to, usually while wearing an expression that suggests they've had this conversation thousands of times and they didn't enjoy it to start with. As of November 2008, the bottles concerned were 500ml Strathmore Still Spring Water. The website states that "No bottles, cans, alcohol, food or glowsticks is to be brought into the venue", although they didn't seem to care when I brought a huge stack of glowsticks in, even pointing them out to the bouncer during a bag search.

The venue website states that there is wheelchair access via front-of-house (although no disabled backstage access), and a raised viewing gallery.

The floor of the main room slopes downwards towards the stage: while definitely improving the view, it can make navigating large crowds of somewhat unsteady people a bit trickier than it would be otherwise. There are toilets conveniently located to the side of the main room, which means you don't have to fight your way through the entire crowd whenever you need to go for a wee during a packed gig.