3 /5 Anne Elk [Miss]: I have such mixed feelings about the 606. It’s a lovely intimate venue with great acoustics, lovely food and a wonderful atmosphere where you can see world class artists really close up for the price of a very nice dinner and a really reasonable music charge (and the people complaining about the music charge are idiots; do they think professional musicians should go to work for free?!) They also have a “quiet room” policy, which is great, respect shown to the artists is a lovely thing to see although obviously this is hard to enforce once people have a few drinks inside them. So, from a music and dining point of view, a great venue.
On the other hand, and I have to raise this because it might help others - *completely* inaccessible for many if not most people with disabilities. I really struggled on my crutches and a wheelchair user simply wouldn’t be able to access it at all - even if they were willing to suffer the indignity of being carried down the steps there are no accessible facilities and no way to move in a wheelchair or using any other mobility assistance once you get down there because the tables are crammed in so tight. This worried me in the event of an emergency; once I got seated I found myself scanning the room for a way out that would be safe for me and people behind me, and there just didn’t seem to be one. This total lack of accessibility really shouldn’t be a thing in nearly 2026, and it sullied what would have otherwise been a 5 star night.
Of course it’s a historic building, and it’s in a basement, and buildings like that can’t just be made fully accessible at the drop of a hat, and the staff were very helpful and really did their best, providing info about the steps before the visit and trying to help me down them once I was there. But there are so many little things that could be done to make it a bit more accessible which would really help. For example, making those really steep steps better lit - someone had to go down before me shining a phone light so I didn’t fall - or having some kind of removable stairlift installed (the stairs are straight and wide, so it might be practically doable), or making sure that toilet cubicle doors don’t open inwards so people using mobility aids can still get into them (important, since there’s no accessible toilet) - I couldn’t with the crutches because there simply wasn’t room to navigate around the door and the toilet with them and no room to use them to push myself back up again, so trying to use the loo was a total nightmare. Even putting a grab rail on the wall would help a bit. It seems they just haven’t thought about these really basic things and that’s disappointing, because fixing them could make such a difference, not to every disabled patron but at least to some, and could be the difference between someone being able to enjoy the same gigs as everyone else and not being able to access them at *all*.
I went and suffered that because it was the only London date for someone I really wanted to see, but it definitely means I wouldn’t go there for a night out or to discover new music, and it’s not because I don’t want to - I’d love to be able to support a great venue like this - it’s because the inaccessibility of the setup means I *can’t*, and that’s a real shame.
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