Olympic Studios

Olympic Studios is an early 20th-century building in Barnes, London, which, after four years of closure, re-opened on 14 October 2013 as the new home for the Olympic Studios cinema. As well as a two-screen cinema, the building includes a café and dining room, a members' club and a recording studio.

The building at 117 Church Road in Barnes was constructed in 1906 as Byfeld Hall, a theatre for the Barnes Repertory Company, and was a cinema for much of the first half of the century, before becoming a television studio in the late 1950s. In 1965 it was purchased by Olympic Sound Studios to become a renowned independent commercial recording studio, best known for the many legendary rock and pop recordings made there from the late 1960s onwards. It has been described as the "go-to studio for many of rock and pop's leading lights in the music industry's golden era, from the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix to Led Zeppelin and The Beatles", and as being of the same importance as Abbey Road Studios. The studio's sound mixing desks eventually became famous in their own right, and were later manufactured commercially.

The conversion from film to recording studio was undertaken by architect Robertson Grant and the acoustics completed by Keith Grant and Russel Pettinger. The studios won Music Week magazine's award for best recording studio five times. After forty years and a succession of owners, the studio's earlier facilities were closed by the EMI and Virgin Group in 2009. However, Olympic has now been converted into an independent local cinema incorporating reminders of its own history, including a new studio designed with the help of original members of the studio's staff. In keeping with its audio history, Olympic's cinema is now also the only one in London employing a new form of state-of-the-art cinema sound.

After its earliest days, the building became a theatre briefly again in the 1920s: actors who played there included John Gielgud and Claude Rains. Between the 1930s and the postwar era, it returned to its original function as a cinema. In its first decade it was notable for being one of the venues associated with the bioscope, an early form of cinema combined with music hall and large instrumentation. In the 1950s the building became television production studios.

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