50 Carnaby Street

50 Carnaby Street in London's Soho district was the site of several important music clubs in the 20th century. These clubs were often run for and by the black community, with jazz and calypso music predominating in the earlier years. From 1936, it was the Florence Mills Social Parlour. In the 1940s it was the Blue Lagoon Club. In 1950, it was briefly Club Eleven, and from the early 1950s it was the Sunset Club. From 1961, it was occupied by the Roaring Twenties nightclub. In the 1970s it was Columbo's. It is now a Ben Sherman shop.

From 1936 it was the location of the Florence Mills Social Parlour, named after the black actress Florence Mills and run by Amy Ashwood, first wife of Marcus Garvey.

Garvey started the venture with Sam Manning, a pioneering black recording artist and calypso singer from Trinidad, and it was part restaurant, part social centre and part jazz club, and a location where black intellectuals and anyone interested in Pan-Africanism could meet. Visitors included the historian C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian journalist George Padmore, the future president of Kenya Jomo Kenyatta, the Guyanese Pan-Africanist T. Ras Makonnen and the Ghanaian politician J.B. Danquah.

In the 1940s it was the Blue Lagoon Club, supposedly a front for prostitution. In November 1946, Margaret Cook, an "exotic dancer", was shot dead outside the club and it was said that guns had to be handed in at the door with coats. The police investigation into the murder of blonde Mrs Cook was hampered by the discovery that she had several different names. Also in 1946, Mrs Violet Boofty was found gassed in her flat the night after her birthday party at the Blue Lagoon. The Inquest found that there was no evidence that she had been assaulted by a man at the club as had been reported.

Club Eleven were resident for six months in 1950 until they were closed by a police raid. It then became the calypso Sunset Club.

...
Wikipedia