You would not, on the face of it, expect one of South London’s most storied rock and roll addresses to be a bingo hall. Yet that is exactly what Buzz Bingo in Tooting is and, this past weekend, a grassroots campaign that ran for the best part of three years has seen the Grade I-listed building pick up a publicly funded blue plaque. Punters dabbing their tickets underneath the chandeliers are, whether they clock it or not, sitting in the old Granada, which was a venue that once had the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix filing through its stage door.
A Cinema Built to Show Off
The Granada opened its doors in 1931 as a 3,000-seat picture palace, the work of the Russian theatre director Theodore Komisarjevsky, who was obviously not a man for half measures. He kitted the place out with a baronial foyer, Gothic flourishes and a mirrored hall lifted from the Palace of Versailles, which is the sort of interior that makes a modern multiplex look apologetic by comparison. When Historic England handed the building its Grade I listing in 2000, it reckoned the Granada had ‘without doubt the most lavishly decorated interior of any cinema in Britain’.
The bingo came much later. Long before anyone in the building was shouting ‘two fat ladies’, the Granada was a stop on just about every tour worth its salt. The Beatles played two houses here on the first of June 1963, midway through their co-headlining run with Roy Orbison, and by all accounts had a hectic day of it, having spent hours in a BBC studio before rolling into Tooting. The Rolling Stones turned up the following January, sharing top billing with The Ronettes, and in the April of 1967, Jimi Hendrix closed out the grand finale of his first major UK tour on the same stage.
From a Performance Venue to a Cinema
Blue Plaque Marks Bingo Hall’s Rock Legacy
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A publicly funded blue plaque has been unveiled at Buzz Bingo Tooting in recognition of the building’s historic role as one of Britain’s leading entertainment venues, following a three-year community… pic.twitter.com/AyfZKdoXWw
— London Daily (@LDNDailyDigital) June 30, 2026
The likes of The Kinks and Dusty Springfield are amongst the other names said to have graced SW17 over the years, which is not a bad roll call for a room where you now go to have a flutter on the numbers. That the Granada is still standing at all owes rather a lot to bingo. The cinema went dark in the early 1970s and might well have met the wrecking ball, but its conversion into a bingo club in 1976 kept the developers at bay. Better still, the fittings that matter, such as the original stage, the orchestra pit and the medieval wall panels, all survived the change of use.
The happy result of that is that a night at the bingo now unfolds beneath the same mirrored splendour that once looked down on Hendrix and McCartney, which is not something you can say of many gaming venues. The plaque itself is the work of local historian Geoff Simmons, who fronted the campaign to get the Granada properly recognised. Free guided walks, school talks and ‘show time’ performances on the building’s front steps all helped make the case and it came good, with an unveiling on Saturday, the 27th of June, timed to land in the middle of National Bingo Week.
Music fans gathered outside for live covers of the venue’s old alumni, though as you might expect, the right-hand entrance was kept clear for the bingo regulars, who arguably prefer a full house to the Lennon-McCartney songbook. Blue plaques are London’s way of marking the spots where the great and the good lived, worked or otherwise caused a stir and they carry a useful side benefit of keeping handsome old buildings out of the hands of developers. On that score, the Granada is a worthy addition that is well worth going to have a look at if you get the chance.