10 styles · 24 venues · 11 bands and companies · 14 artists · 47 songs
London
London · Opera and the Concert Room
The Great Alianor Theatre
A tall house of stone and brick on Alianor Square, with four galleries, private boxes and machinery the provinces call unfair.
London · The Foreign Recital
The King's Symphonic Rooms
Half theatre and half concert room, where visiting virtuosi are made fashionable.
London, near King's Basin · The Foreign Recital
Vexley Hall
The concert room, endowed by the Vexley merchant family: fewer seats than the Great Alianor and more prestige in each.
London · The Music Hall
Playhouse Lane
The brightest street of the halls, supper rooms and booths.
London · The Music Hall
The Angel Yard House of Playing
Comedies, touring companies and quick-change pieces gone in a fortnight.
London · The Gloam
The Southbank Rooms
Where the Gloam's bands play the capital, and where Ash and Ivy play louder than any band in London; purists who remember the viols say the Gloam has lost its quiet.
Beneath London · The Gloam
The Undercity Cellars
A room fills for some other reason, the lamps go down, and the masked singer is there.
London · The Gloam
The Hollow Lyre
One of the city's darker houses: recitation, small music and whispered verse, and the quiet Gloam's favourite room.
Oxford
Oxford · Bells, Psalm and Office
The Cathedral Nave
The cold stone where the winter offices are sung, and where the Deep Bell rehearses alone before dawn, on the principle that a voice that holds there will hold anywhere.
Oxford · Opera and the Concert Room
The Red Hart Rooms
Oxford's principal secular hall.
Oxford · The Alehouse and the Green
The Mitred Hart, the back room
Chapter men and the schools in the front rooms; singers, visiting antiquaries and students in the back, where Oxford sings what it would not sing in the nave.
Cambridge
Cambridge · The Gloam
Copper Hall
Never, the Collegium insists, a theatre: a hall of guild exhibitions, instrument trials and demonstrations that their makers call experiments until somebody charges at the door.
Cambridge, by the White Masts · Mast-Yard and Engine Songs
The Ballast Shed
The crews' own taproom beside the White Mast Yard, built from an old ballast store.
Cambridge, Scholar's Reach · The Gloam
The White Compass
Yard masters before supper and Schola students after it.
Sarrum
Sarrum, Fleecegate · Shift Songs
The Red Shed
A bonded wool store licensed as three public houses side by side, with a floor for a thousand on their feet.
Sarrum · Shift Songs
The Ash and Barrow
Widow Joan Kell's house, where the price of the loaf is watched like a clock.
The road and the country
The fair towns and the Northern Marches · Road Ballads
The Coaching Inns of the Road
Taprooms where the bard plays slow while the room comes in, the road songs when it is full, and the comic ones when the drink has done its work.
Little Wendle, Oxfordshire · The Alehouse and the Green
The Wheatsheaf
One inn, one keeper: sixpence for a place in the shared bed and eightpence for supper, the same to the carrier of ten years as to a stranger.
Kent and the coast
Dover, the quay streets · Quay and Pilgrim Songs
The Mariners' Rest
A quay house whose back room belongs to Tom Sarre on the nights he is home.
Dover, the quay streets · Quay and Pilgrim Songs
Mary Snodland's, the back room
Where singers, conjurers and lantern-show men wait for a crossing, and where Tom Sarre sings his songs of loss: the best room in Dover for an hour, and the saddest.
Kent, the yards on the Brook · Quay and Pilgrim Songs
The Ship and Shears
The shipwrights' house, where Ned Pittock is the best singer in the room after a match, and where the yards talk of laying down tools on pay night.
Canterbury · Quay and Pilgrim Songs
The Mitre and Key
The pilgrims' inn, sixpence a shared bed all the year, where Hester Pagden chalks the shrine's count by the door and reads the badges on every hat before she reads the faces under them.
Canterbury, the High Street · Quay and Pilgrim Songs
The Rose and Crozier
Its upper room is the best place for a concert in Kent, and Alys Harbledown can fill it without ever having been asked to sing inside the precinct.
Canterbury, Copyists' Row · The Gloam
Quinton's, the upper room
A coffee room where the archive's talk comes out by day; upstairs, two evenings a week, the Canterbury Gloam meets with viols and verse and no iron at all.
