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Ad Lib Club

1960s disestablishments in England1960s establishments in EnglandNightclubs in LondonSoho, London

The Ad Lib Club was a nightclub on the fourth floor of 7 Leicester Place over the Prince Charles Cinema in London's Soho district. It opened in February 1964 (or December 1963), and closed in its original location after a fire. The owner, Brian Morris, unsuccessfully tried to reopen the club in Covent Garden. The club was noted for its R&B and Soul music.Mark Lewisohn describes the club as the nightclub "most strongly associated with The Beatles". The Beatles ended their evening at the club following the premiere of A Hard Day's Night in July 1964.Cynthia and John Lennon and George Harrison and Pattie Boyd thought the lift going up to the club was on fire during their first LSD trip in 1965, an event which Harrison called "The Dental Experience". The Beatles had their own table at the club. It was at the club that Ringo Starr proposed to Maureen Cox in January 1965.The musician and writer George Melly characterised the relationship between the entertainment and social elite of Swinging London and the rest of Britain's youth as "feudal" with "edicts handed down from the Ad Lib Club ... to the teeny boppers in the outer darkness". The Ad Lib was supplanted in popularity by the Scotch of St. James.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Ad Lib Club (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).

Ad Lib Club
Leicester Place, London Chinatown

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Latitude Longitude
N 51.5115 ° E -0.1302 °
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Prince Charles Cinema

Leicester Place 7
WC2H 7BP London, Chinatown
England, United Kingdom
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Statue of Charlie Chaplin, London
Statue of Charlie Chaplin, London

The statue of Charlie Chaplin in Leicester Square, London, is a work of 1979 by the sculptor John Doubleday. It portrays the actor, comedian and filmmaker in his best-known role, as The Tramp. A memorial to Chaplin in the city of his birth was proposed on 25 December 1977, soon after Chaplin's death, by Illtyd Harrington, the leader of the opposition in the Greater London Council. Initial plans for a memorial in the Elephant and Castle, in South London where Chaplin spent his early years, were dropped and instead Leicester Square, at the centre of London's entertainment district, became the preferred location for the work.The bronze statue was first unveiled on 16 April 1981 (the 92nd anniversary of Chaplin's birth) at its original site, on the south-western corner of the square, by the actor Sir Ralph Richardson. An inscription on the plinth read THE COMIC GENIUS/ WHO GAVE PLEASURE/ TO SO MANY. The following year a slightly modified version was erected in the Swiss town of Vevey, which had been Chaplin's home from 1952 until his death. Following a refurbishment of Leicester Square in 1989–1992, the statue was moved to a site north of the statue of William Shakespeare, the square's centrepiece.In a later refurbishment of 2010–2012 Chaplin's statue was removed altogether, together with busts of William Hogarth, John Hunter, Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Joshua Reynolds. The statue was installed in a nearby street, Leicester Place, in 2013. This was in order to prevent damage to the sculpture during improvement works. In 2016 it returned to Leicester Square and was re-unveiled on Chaplin's birthday.