50 Carnaby Street
building in London, England
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.
Florence Mills Social Parlour
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.
The public source identifies “50 Carnaby Street” as building in London, England. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Carnaby, Street and building.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17508554. Authority coordinates are 51.513, -0.139. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936, 1950 and 1961.
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This entry incorporates text from “50 Carnaby Street” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.