The Box Soho

The Box opened on Walker's Court in 2011, in the bones of the old Raymond Revuebar, as the London sister to Simon Hammerstein's Manhattan original. It calls itself a theatre of varieties, and that is the honest description: a cabaret nightclub built around a stage, where the late show is the reason the room exists. Behind an unmarked Soho door, the main room rises across two levels of gilded panelling, marbled walls and red velvet, a domed ceiling overhead and tiered booths circling a catwalk that runs to a curtained stage.

The building runs to roughly 7,000 square feet across three floors, from the reception foyer up through the auditorium and down to the Speakeasy below. The Theatre is the heart of it, a raked room of comfortable booth seating with a full bar at the back and a working stage with its own production rig; the lounge seating and catwalk clear to open a dance floor once the performance ends. Downstairs, the Speakeasy is a darker, more intimate red-lit room with an LED dance floor, mirrored walls and a wood bar, made for close-up acts and after-hours.

For private events the spaces hire individually or as a whole-venue takeover, with a late licence and a resident sound and lighting setup already in place. It is one of the few rooms in Soho where a DJ inherits a genuine theatre: a stage, a dance floor and a crowd that came out to be entertained.