A Forest Gate Music Landmark
BB Social Club, known locally as BB’s, was a music venue and social club at 53 Hampton Road, Forest Gate. Run by Belford Butler from his home from the early 1990s until his death in 2008, BB’s was in his Victorian house which backed on to the railway track and had a simple ‘BB’ over the front door, with the main music hall at the back. Originally built as the Elyssa School of Dancing in 1910, the dance hall was built over the top of the back garden, with a sprung maple dance floor, raised stage and bar. At some point around the 1970s the dancing school closed, and various applications were made to change the use of the dance floor including an Irish Community Centre, residential flats, and a religious organisation, which were all rejected by the council.
Exterior of BBs former venue, 2025
You walked through the house, through a second door, and suddenly you were in the venue.
– Mark Norton
As a former chef including in a local school, BB was known for serving generous plates of Caribbean food for guests alongside the music. Unusually for the time it was a non-smoking venue. Sundays often saw older Jamaican men filling the hall with the sound of dominoes, while evenings brought live jazz, reggae, blues and DJ nights. Later, local teacher Mark McGlynn used the venue to give young bands their first gigs, with crowds of parents and friends packing the room.
Described by musicians as “like a house party,” BB’s combined live music with warmth, food and community. After BB’s death, the building was leased by a church for several years and has now been converted into flats.
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Oral histories
Mike Edmonds
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Background
Mike Edmonds, musician who also put on regular nights at BBs in the 2000s.
Transcript
So, I was walking down the street in about September 2004, then my mate, Mark McGlynn, comes along. And he says he knows this guy, Bebe, who’s got a club in Forest Gate. How about putting on some jazz there? I said, ‘Yeah, that’s great’. So then I set about booking some of the people that I’ve been working with. Will Gains, the famous tap dancer. He was from Detroit. He grew up with Elvin Jones. He was a regular booking. So he used to come, come down. Jeff Green, fantastic guitarist. He used to play with Stefan Grappelli, and before that, in the 70s, he’d played with Elton Dean and loads of free jazz. Mike Osborne. So, we started playing together. Lori Lowe, drummer. He’s doing a lot of gigs these days all over the place. He was at one of our regular drummers, George Hart from Leytonstone, he was another regular drummer. Both guys were brilliant. Colin Campbell, he turned up, great saxophone player. Then my other mate, Iver Eisenberg, another great drummer. He started playing with us. And he was big, big into the art scene. So he started bringing loads of art people down.
Yeah, BB was a brilliant cook and a fantastic host. Lovely, lovely man. My friend Mark said that, yeah, used to cook school dinners and for schools in forest gate. Apparently he was a chef in the airport in Montego Bay, I think, in Jamaica, before he came over to England. So the food was a massive part of the or of any night at a club and…
Food and music so you get fantastic Caribbean food and a fantastic world class jazz group for £5, 20 years ago.
Mark Norton
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Mark Norton, born 1963 in Romford, moved to Forest Gate in 1985 and played BB’s Club and other local venues with his band the Gene Drayton Unit.
Transcript
One Sunday, we went to BBs. His place was in Hampton Road, 53 Hampton Road. It’s a big property, so we turned up there for the first time, and it’s just, you just see a front door of a typical house. Knocked on the door, BB welcomed us in and we and then walked us down the passageway on the ground floor. So we come in the front door, just walked to the back, still really not knowing what to expect, and then opened the door into this dance hall. Most extraordinary thing, these stories are not terribly well documented, but as I understand it, in in the 40s, the then owner of the property had decided to build this dance hall. So the, BBs property backed onto the railway line, and he built a roof over what would have been the back garden and laid a proper sprung maple dance floor. So it was a truly a dance hall. So we looked through into the dance hall, and on the right there was a stage, which was actually quite high. It was probably four feet off the ground. So when you played, you were looking at the tops of people’s heads. It being a large room, there were tables and chairs around the back of the room, but there was a space in the front where people could dance.
The principle was sound system, the reggae sound system, but the practice was that he basically gathered as many domestic Hi Fi speakers as he could find, and the wiring was left a lot to be desired. The first time we were there, as I recall, our guitarist got up on stage and said, ‘I’m not playing on there’, because there was so many dangling wires and and also the ceiling in was quite low.
But there was lots of other stuff going on at BBs. He was, yeah, there were reggae nights and all kinds of other things going on there. You know, blues bands would play there. It was one of those things that you wouldn’t find a band that was necessarily touring the country would play at BBs. But if somebody that lived in the area knew BBs and they were in a band that was touring, then they would make sure that BBs was one of the places that they played. So there’d be blues bands and country music and all sorts there.
I get the sense that a lot of people that that still live in the area miss it. It was an important part of a lot of people’s like lives, the people that live there. For their own entertainment, but also for the fact that it was like a nursery for young aspiring musicians.
Quinton Scott
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Background
Quinton Scott, born 1967 in Surrey, runs Strut Records and programmed music at Stratford Circus from 2003 to 2007.
Transcript
BBS, to me, it’s a tragedy that place closed because it was great. I discovered it quite late, probably only about a year before it closed down, I think. And it was in the middle of a row of terraced houses, very nice terraced houses in Forest Gate. And I remember the first time I went there, I walked up and down the road a couple of times before I actually found it. It was literally nestled in between two quite nice townhouses in this side road in Forest Gate.
It was just one small room you’d go in. It was very dimly lit. They just had the coloured lights, the coloured rope lights going around the outside of the venue. He had a little bar on the right hand side, which didn’t sell much, just sold beers and a couple of spirits, and they just had a few chairs there. And it was the simplest place. It was just a really lovely place to hang out. It was just one of those little jewels in London where you could go and just relax and not have to think about some big production number. You could just go there and have a chat to people and enjoy the music really. And that was definitely a good little gem to find, sort of late on, when it was around.
George Gargan
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George Gargan, born 1971 in Manor Park, co-runs Damnably, a Newham-based record label, publisher and live music company founded in 2006.
Transcript
One time I when I was back, one time. When I was back in Forest Gate, I’d noticed in Time Out that there was a music venue in Forest Gate called BBs, so I decided to go along and see what that was like because I’d never been and it was- It’s in Forest gate, just down from the station, and it was a guy’s house, and you just knocked on the door and he’d let you in, BB. He must have been like a jazz enthusiast. His house was laid out like 150 or 200 capacity music venue with stage and bar and speakers. So it looked like a real music venue. And I went there with one of my friends. And then another of my friends from Leicester was actually playing. And so that was amazing.