In 1991, our founders returned from a life-changing trip to New York to take a leap of faith. They gambled that a beaten-up old bus depot in an unloved part of South London could become the hottest nightclub in town – a place where people could dance the night away to euphoric house music and leave as the bin trucks and forensics squads turned up at dawn.
Ministry of Sound was the first club dedicated to house music, the first club to pick up the gauntlet laid down by the Second Summer of Love and, most importantly, the first nightclub in London with a room built purely for exceptional sound quality.
The sound systems in each of our four rooms are like nothing else you’ll find in London. The rig in our main space The Box is renowned the world over by DJs and club connoisseurs alike. But you don’t need to be an expert to appreciate how sick it is. The towering speaker stacks, several million watts of bass and triple-thick absorbing walls will make sure you get the message: it really is a unique experience you really need to hear and see for yourself on the most iconic sprung wooden dance floor in South London.
103 is the first room you come to after entering the club and is named after our storied address on Gaunt Street. Serving as the second stage on club nights, this is where we bring emerging artists to break through to new audiences as they queue at our room-long industrial bar, stocked with any drink you could desire.
Baby Box is almost like a club in itself: with a raucous, intimate atmosphere reminiscent of the basement dive-bar raving rooms you’ll find scattered throughout London. Finally, The Loft – upstairs on the mezzanine – is where you’ll find the headsier crowd keen to catch regular takeovers from a cherry-picked selection of influential record labels and promoters.
Whichever part of the building you’re in, your ears are sure to be undergoing a religious experience (if indeed ears adhere to any kind of theistic belief system). To this day, sound is still at the forefront of everything we do. Put simply, there is no better place on Earth to hear the world’s greatest DJs play the world’s best music.
