16-07-2025
Denmark Street and the battle for the soul of London's Tin Pan Alley
The Outernet's Now building — a four-storey light-and-sound spectacular that greets you like a slap as you exit Tottenham Court Road tube station — is not an addition to London's cityscape that pays much heed to history. But walk past the advertising screens and through an LED-covered tunnel and you emerge onto Denmark Street: the almost mythical home of post-war London's music scene.
To read some of the more alarmist commentary when the Outernet district opened, you might expect this street to now be just another monument to late-stage capitalism: all global brands, competitive socialising and a Blank Street Coffee. Yet instead I'm stood outside a new record store, looking across the road at Stairway to Kevin, a first-floor guitar repair shop.
If Outernet's arrival signalled 'the day the music died', as one Guardian scribe put it, then on this street it seems to be enjoying a rather remarkable afterlife. Nearby, for instance, is the Roland Store — the first standalone shop the instrument specialist has ever opened — which opened in 2022.
