London Listening: From Backstreet Jazz to Vinyl Sanctuaries

By Rafi Mercer

There’s a London you can hear if you know where to listen for it. Not the street-level roar—the buses, the delivery vans, the rattle of Overground carriages heading east—but a second city underneath, carried on basslines through brick, saxophone notes caught in stairwells, the faint, deliberate crackle of a stylus finding its groove.

It’s a map you can’t see but can trace by ear, a constellation of rooms scattered from Peckham to Shepherd’s Bush, each with its own weather, its own clock, its own rules about how the night should go.

London is big enough to hold every kind of venue—grand concert halls, sticky-floored indie clubs, basement jazz joints—but what interests me most these days are the listening spaces. The rooms built around the idea that music isn’t just something that happens in the background, but the reason you’ve come.

Take Peckham’s Jumbi. Step inside and you’re wrapped in colour before the music even starts—walls painted in deep, warm tones, patterned fabrics, a sense that someone cared about how the place should feel before they worried about what it should sell. The sound is rooted in Afro-Caribbean rhythms, with selectors pulling records that can make the room sway even before anyone’s standing. It’s a bar, yes, but it’s also a celebration—one that doesn’t shout for your attention, but pulls you in with the quiet certainty of a bassline you can feel in your chest. Nights here aren’t about headliners; they’re about the flow, the blend from one record to the next, the way the air shifts when a drum pattern changes.

Move north-east to Hackney and you’ll find Behind This Wall. True to its name, it hides in plain sight, up a short flight of stairs from the street. The lighting is low, the room narrow enough that you can see everyone else, and the sound system sits like a promise at the far end. Here, the focus is often on electronic textures—warm, minimal house, deep dub techno, tracks that unfurl slowly over minutes. It’s a space where you might lose track of time, where the DJ doesn’t so much play songs as build environments. Cocktails are mixed with the same precision as the programming—often seasonal, always balanced, never competing with the music.

If Behind This Wall is about control and atmosphere, Little Fires in Bethnal Green feels more like a gathering in a friend’s living room, if your friend happened to own an impeccable hi-fi system and a wall of vinyl. It’s small—deliberately so—and the sound is tuned to feel close without being overwhelming. Here, selectors range widely, from Brazilian bossa nova to dusty folk to slow-burning soul. The menu keeps pace: small plates you can share without breaking the spell of the record, wines chosen for character, not trend. There’s a sense of generosity to the place, as if the real product isn’t the drink in your hand but the hour you’re given to just sit, listen, and be.

A short hop to Hackney Wick and you’ll find All My Friends, a warehouse-sized rebuttal to the idea that listening bars have to be small to work. The scale is bigger, the ceiling higher, but the focus is still on the sound. The system here has to do more—fill the room without losing intimacy—and it manages it with surprising grace. You might come for a meal first—the kitchen puts out dishes with the same care the selectors put into their sets—and stay for the way the night unfolds. The record store corner is a dangerous little trap for anyone with a collector’s habit; more than one night has ended with me leaving under one arm a bottle of something natural and under the other a record I hadn’t planned to buy.

Then there’s Next Door Records in Shepherd’s Bush, which wears its hybrid identity with ease. By day, it’s a record shop and café—you can stop in for a coffee and leave with a second-hand pressing of a Donny Hathaway live album. By night, it’s a listening bar with a wine list that leans natural and a DJ booth built into the flow of the space. There’s no theatrical moment where the shop “becomes” the bar—it just shifts, slowly, as the light changes outside. If you’re there for both halves of the day, it’s like watching a time-lapse of a flower opening.

These venues aren’t competing in the same lane. They’re points on a spectrum of listening culture—Jumbi’s celebratory energy, Behind This Wall’s precision, Little Fires’ intimacy, All My Friends’ scale, Next Door Records’ easy hybridity. What ties them together is intent. In all of them, the sound system isn’t decoration—it’s the spine. The drinks, the lighting, the furniture, even the way the room is laid out, all bend towards the same purpose: to make you want to stay, and to make the music worth staying for.

It’s tempting to romanticise this as something uniquely London, but the truth is these rooms belong to a global tradition. Tokyo’s jazz-kissas, New York’s loft parties, Berlin’s audiophile bars—they all echo here, translated into the city’s own dialect. The difference in London is the sheer density; you could plot a route across a single night that hits three or four of these spaces without crossing the river.

What’s more, they’ve learned how to adapt to the rhythms of the city. Some open early, catching the morning crowd for coffee before slipping into evening mode. Others hold their energy until the sun goes down, making the most of London’s elastic concept of “closing time.” Many blur the line between bar and restaurant, between shop and venue, between social space and private listening room. That fluidity means they survive in a city where rents are high, audiences are fickle, and music alone rarely pays the bills.

Spend enough nights in these rooms and you start to notice the small rituals. The selector’s nod to the bartender before the next track drops. The way a group will arrive mid-set, stay for one drink, and then realise it’s been three hours. The conversations that start with “What’s this record?” and end with two people swapping numbers. These are the details that make the scene more than just a list of places—they make it a network, a community held together by shared sound.

Of course, none of this matters if the music isn’t good. But in these rooms, it almost always is. That’s partly down to the systems—well-maintained, often custom-built—but mostly down to the people choosing what to play. They’re not chasing trends; they’re building arcs, telling stories, sometimes introducing you to something you didn’t know you needed. And when that moment lands—when the track you’ve never heard before feels like it’s been waiting for you—it’s hard not to feel grateful the room exists.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from the Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.