Little Simz, Kae Tempest and Inua Ellams all played early shows in the small studio upstairs at the Roundhouse. From 16 October, eighteen more acts get the same room: Roundhouse Rising is a five-month season of gigs, theatre, spoken word and club nights, all of it made by people who came up through the venue’s youth programme.
The season runs from October 2026 to February 2027 in the newly renamed Davey Studio, and the programming has been drawn from submissions by young artists already inside the building, via the Resident Artist programme, the podcast platform Transmission Roundhouse, the Roundhouse Music Collective and the Roundhouse Poetry Slam.
Why the room matters
The Roundhouse is a Grade II* listed engine shed that reaches audiences of more than 400,000 a year, but the studio is where the interesting things happen first. It is also, this year, the venue’s twentieth anniversary of reopening as a youth charity, and the point at which it passes 100,000 young people worked with since.
The charity side is not incidental. The youth programme takes in over 10,000 young people a year, and creatives aged 13 to 25 can use professional studios there from as little as £1 an hour. Every ticket and every drink bought in the building pays for that.
The shows worth circling
Three of the premieres stand out on paper. Eliezer Gore’s Last Orders follows a viral YouTuber accused of making money out of content about London’s poorest residents, which is a sharper subject than most new writing is currently going near. Eleanor Cousins Brown’s Brickworks is a night of poetry by writers from UK estates. And the Jasmine Quartet’s Above The Fray is contemporary chamber music, in a season otherwise full of club nights, which takes some nerve.
“The calibre of submissions for this season made it really clear that young people have the talent and ambition,” said Daisy Heath, the Roundhouse’s executive producer. “What they need is space and support, from us here at the Roundhouse, but also from audiences and the wider industry.”
The full line-up
- Fri 16 Oct: Carδamo, Tomodachi ☆ Kimitachi release party, with Sawdu Plushia and Reptile B
- Sat 17 Oct: Jasmine Quartet presents Above The Fray
- Thu 22 Oct: Scratch Night
- Fri 30 to Sat 31 Oct: If I Were To Say It In English, by Thea Lungu
- Wed 11 Nov: Unspoken, EP release by SouSou
- Sat 21 Nov: Ame du Soleil presents an evening of Black, queer music, poetry and art
- Fri 27 to Sat 28 Nov: Lucinda Behinda presents She’s B.Hind You!
- Wed 2 Dec: Brickworks, poets from UK estates, by Eleanor Cousins Brown
- Mon 11 Jan: Scratch Night
- Wed 20 Jan: TOBITHEFREAK, how it feel when it changes
- Sat 24 Jan: lulu melons presents Lulu’s Dinner Party
- Tue 27 Jan: out-of-print Live, with Alice Garnett, Emmeline Armitage and Sophie Parke
- Fri 30 Jan: Heaven on Hertz
- Tue 2 Feb: Open Mic
- Thu 4 Feb: Funeral for a Fox, by Daze Hingorani
- Fri 6 Feb: Adaptive Strategies for a Sensitive System, by Kate Ireland
- Fri 11 to Sat 12 Feb: Nuisance, by Rosie Robertson
- Fri 19 to Sat 20 Feb: Last Orders, by Eliezer Gore
Our take: this is the best-value programming in Camden and it is the sort of season most people only discover retrospectively, when someone they saw in a hundred-capacity room is selling out the main space five years later. Book two or three rather than one, because the point of a Scratch Night is that you do not yet know which of them is the good one, and go to something outside your usual habits: if you would normally pick the club night, take the chamber music instead. Get there early enough to walk round the outside of the building first, because the Roundhouse is a Victorian railway turning shed and it reads as one from Chalk Farm Road in a way it does not from inside.
Need to know
- What: Roundhouse Rising, eighteen shows and gigs curated from the Roundhouse’s own youth programme
- Where: Davey Studio, the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1 8EH
- When: 16 October 2026 to 20 February 2027
- Booking: roundhouse.org.uk
- Worth knowing: every ticket and drink funds the youth programme, which works with over 10,000 young people a year
- Nearest station: Chalk Farm
More of the neighbourhood in our Camden guide, and the rest of what is on in our guide to what to do in London this week.
