Space Talk — A Room That Listens Back in Farringdon
By Rafi Mercer
New Listing
Address: 18–20 St John Street, London EC1M 4AY, United Kingdom
Phone: not listed
It starts on St John Street with a soft glow through glass and the quiet susurration of people deciding to stay. Farringdon can be feverish on a weekend—Smithfield’s echoes, late trains coming and going—but Space Talk moves differently. You don’t hear it before you see it. You sense it: a pocket of stillness that feels like it’s tuned to a different channel. Step inside and the city falls away by a few decibels, the room revealing itself in layers—warm timber, soft curves, a bar that feels more like a line break than a counter, a listening booth sunk into the architecture like a promise. This is not a place that tries to be everything; it’s a place that dares to be one thing well: a listening bar where the room and the record meet you halfway.
The first thing you notice is how the design calms your shoulders. The architecture—by EBBA with Studio Charlotte Taylor—wraps the space in natural materials and rounded forms so the eye never snags on a hard edge. Light is handled like an instrument: enough to see faces, not enough to break the spell. There’s a composure here, a kind of hospitality that happens before service begins, delivered by wood, plaster, and the way the room breathes. You feel it before you know why. The explanation, if you go looking, is simple: the place was conceived around sound and community, built to generate intimacy. It’s design as hush, but not as silence.
Then you hear the system. Not loud—never loud—but present, the way a good conversation sits at the right distance across a table. The sound is by Friendly Pressure, with speakers produced in collaboration with fabricator Lewis Kemmenoe; the acoustics handled by Ethan Bourdeau. It’s a rarer approach than you’d think: commission the room, then commission the sound for the room, rather than parachuting in kit and praying the walls agree. The result is clarity without glare, bass with a pulse not a shove, and a midrange that can hold a voice in the air without crowding you. You could talk in here for hours and never feel like you’re fighting the record. That’s not volume. That’s intent.
Space Talk describes itself as a hi-fi bar with “unique music curation spanning different genres, delivered through a bespoke sound system.” Simple words, heavy lift. The address is printed plainly—18–20 St John Street—and the hours are the sort that reward evening arrivals and late lingerers, with weeknights easing to midnight and weekends running deeper. You don’t need a manifesto when the room does the talking. Most venues announce themselves; this one invites.
There’s a particular cadence to a night here. The early sessions are conversational; selections tilt toward space and texture—jazz that respects quiet, electronic music with air in the envelope, soul records that sound like they were recorded for this exact shade of light. Later, the arc tightens and the booth leans into propulsion without leaning on volume. The sunken position of that booth matters: it’s a signal that the selector is among, not above—the room and the person shaping its soundtrack share a plane. That single move collapses the distance between audience and author, performance and presence.
Look closer and you’ll realise Space Talk is more than a room with good taste. It’s building a small ecosystem. On its first anniversary, the team launched ST Records, a vinyl-only label distributing music made by artists who’ve shaped the bar’s sound—some of it recorded within these very walls during quiet Sunday sessions. The debut compilation, ST01, reads like a map of the venue’s DNA: pieces chosen because they live properly in this acoustic, not because they crush on big systems elsewhere. It’s a subtle statement of values: a bar commissioning a record that sounds best in its own room. That’s a loop worth celebrating—space into record, record back into space.
The build itself reveals a thousand small decisions in service of listening. Seating by Spazio Leone is placed to keep sightlines open without turning guests into an audience; the palette leans warm to lower cognitive noise; the joinery softens corners so reflections don’t harden the treble. The room’s curves aren’t only aesthetic—they ease the path of sound. If you care about this stuff (we do), it’s a quiet thrill to realise you can sit almost anywhere and still catch the micro-dynamics of a brushed snare, the lift in a singer’s consonants, the way a synth’s attack relaxes into sustain. You won’t know the names behind those choices unless you ask, but your body understands the difference immediately.
There’s a hospitality logic at work that’s increasingly rare: Space Talk isn’t an altar to gear, it’s a room for people. Staff move like they’re in on the secret—never cutting across the sound field, never rushing the turn. The menu keeps faith with the atmosphere: drinks built for conversation, food that arrives as punctuation rather than interruption. It’s not precious. It’s precise. The sort of place where you could bring someone who cares about records and someone who doesn’t, and both would leave with the same look on their face: shoulders lower, voice softer, time slightly altered.
Farringdon is a good home for this kind of confidence. The neighbourhood has always contained contradictions—industry and appetite, offices and afters, pubs that shake with laughter and corners that prefer a whisper. Space Talk occupies the seam between those energies. Cross the threshold and you’re in a different register—what was chatter becomes tone, what was noise becomes texture. You start to notice the city’s timbre rather than its volume.
Details matter here, even in the admin. The footprint sits a short walk from Farringdon station, close enough to be convenient, far enough to avoid becoming a conduit for the wrong kind of passing traffic. Hours extend late on Fridays and Saturdays, and Sundays are treated like a coda, a slower exhale that suits the room’s temperament. Some nights carry names you’ll recognise—a guest from a label you love, a selector whose mixes you’ve lived with for years. Other nights are just the room doing its work, letting records breathe. If you’re the sort who likes to plan, keep an eye on their channels; if you’re the sort who trusts serendipity, turn up and accept the set you’re given.
The sound itself carries a character I think of as conversational fidelity. You can pick apart the mix if you want—place the mid-bass, listen for room modes, admire how the highs never brittled into sibilance—but that’s not really the point. The point is how it makes people behave. You see it when the room tilts toward a vocal and no one raises their voice to fight it, or when a deep, sinewy bassline arrives and heads nod in time without the tables rattling along. It’s the old truth: a system tuned to collaborate with its space will always beat one trying to dominate it. Space Talk’s engineers got that right from day one.
What I love most is the venue’s refusal to flatten taste. You’ll hear psychedelic disco one hour, broken-beat minimalism the next, a soul record that sounds like wood and wax, then a left-field ambient piece that turns the chatter into chorus. It’s not eclecticism for its own sake; it’s curation with a memory and a mouth. The selections honour the past, invite the present, and leave enough room for the future to surprise you.
There’s also an unspoken social contract alive in the room: we’re all here to make this work. The staff hold the line without ever needing to draw one; the selectors read the table edges as carefully as the dance floor cues; the guests adjust as the light temperature warms. If you’ve spent nights in places where volume is a mask, Space Talk feels like a relief—nothing to hide behind, everything to enjoy.
By the time you step back onto St John Street, Farringdon’s pulse feels newly legible. A bus sighs to a stop and you hear the air pressure shift; a friend laughs across the road and you catch the harmonics. Good listening rooms do that—they reset your calibration so the city arrives with more detail, less abrasion. You don’t leave Space Talk with a ringing in your ears. You leave with a sense that the night still has notes left in it.
If Tracks & Tales exists to map rooms where sound is the point, Space Talk sits bright on that map. Not as a pastiche of Japanese kissas, not as a neon-led, playlist-on-shuffle simulacrum of “vibe,” but as a London space, designed in London, for the way Londoners actually live. It’s new, yes, and careful with itself in the way new things should be. But it’s already doing the thing that matters most: reminding people that listening is a shared act. That’s how scenes start—quietly, on purpose, and with records that sound like they’ve finally found a room that deserves them.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from the Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
