Phoenix Arts Club

Phoenix Arts Club is a 105-capacity, cabaret-style venue beneath London’s Phoenix Theatre. Its defining feature is the setting: the club occupies the theatre’s original dressing rooms and rehearsal spaces, a below-street room whose theatrical past remains part of the experience. Founded in 1988, it now presents a busy evening programme of cabaret, live music, comedy, drag and musical-theatre-centred events, alongside its role as a late-night West End meeting place.

From rehearsal rooms to after-hours Soho

The rooms above and below the Phoenix Theatre carried performance history before the club arrived. During the 1930s, Noël Coward, Gertrude Lawrence and Laurence Olivier used these rehearsal spaces while Private Lives was being created. Entrepreneur John Mahoney opened the club in 1988 as Shuttleworths, later known as the Phoenix Artist Club; it became a post-show base for actors, singers and comedians working nearby. Maurice Huggett acquired the venue in the mid-1990s and ran it through a particularly characterful era. His death in 2011 placed the club at a turning point: Ken Wright and Colin Savage inherited his shares, then developed ticketed entertainment and a membership model alongside the bar operation. That succession explains the current venue’s combination of private-club history and public-facing performance calendar.

The room today

Expect a close, seated cabaret setup, with tables facing the performance area and a bar-led atmosphere suited to shows with direct audience contact. The official hire specification lists 105 seats in cabaret layout. Programming reaches across cabaret and variety, showtunes, comedy, drag and live music; jazz, pop, electronic and R&B all fit the broader musical mix. It presents ticketed shows while also operating as a rehearsal space by day and a cocktail-bar hangout after performances, so the room carries activity beyond a conventional concert schedule.