The first and last time The Kinks ever played together in public was at The Clissold Arms, Muswell Hill.
Thirty-six years. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Waterloo Sunset. You Really Got Me. Dedicated Follower of Fashion. Lola. Muswell Hillbillies. The entire arc of one of the most influential rock bands Britain has ever produced contained within the walls of a pub on Fortis Green Road in North London.
The childhood home of Ray and Dave Davies is directly across the street.
I'm Expat Andy. This is Publicity - Your London Travel Toolkit, Love Letter to Pubs Shorts Series.
Muswell Hill takes its name from the medieval Mossy Well, believed to have healing powers. In the 12th century, the Bishop of London granted land nearby to a newly formed order of nuns. They built a chapel there called Our Lady of Muswell. Legend says Scotland’s King Malcolm IV was cured after drinking from the spring.
The area remained a quiet village with a few large country houses on a high point of London until Alexandra Palace opened on a nearby ridge in 1873.
Alexandra Palace, known as “Ally Pally,” was built as North London’s People’s Palace, with concert halls, exhibition spaces, a theatre, a racecourse, and a railway.
In 1936, the BBC launched the world’s first regular high-definition TV service from its transmitter. John Logie Baird, who made the first public television demonstrations in 1926, had a pub named after him on this road. It's now called The Village Green.
Modern Muswell Hill was largely created by builder James Edmondson and developer William J. Collins. Edmondson rode through Muswell Hill on a penny-farthing, liked what he saw, and bought thirty acres of flat land at the top of the hill in 1896.
Edmondson laid out the area’s broad avenues - Queens Avenue and Princes Avenue, and red-brick shopping parades, while Collins developed the adjacent Fortismere and Firs estates.
Together they built a remarkably unified Edwardian suburb between 1896 and 1914, much of which is now protected as a conservation area. The terraces, and eventually The Clissold Arms pub followed the growth sparked by Alexandra Palace.
In the late 1940s, Frederick and Annie Davies moved their family to 6 Denmark Terrace, Fortis Green, opposite The Clissold Arms. Their sons, Ray and Dave Davies - future founders of The Kinks - grew up in a lively, music-filled home where family parties around an upright piano mixed music hall songs, jazz, and early rock and roll. Kinks historian Thomas Kitts later suggested Ray Davies’ stage shows echoed those crowded Saturday-night singalongs and chaotic front-room gatherings.
Both brothers attended William Grimshaw School in Muswell Hill, alongside future rock star Rod Stewart, who briefly played with Ray Davies’ early group before forming his own band. In December 1960, the Davies brothers gave their first public performance at The Clissold Arms.
A CAMRA plaque at the pub commemorates the event.
In The Kinks song “Fortis Green,” Dave Davies linked The Clissold Arms directly to his family’s life, recalling his father’s regular visits to the pub.
Ray and Dave Davies formed The Kinks in 1964, breaking into the charts with “You Really Got Me,” whose distorted guitar riff became one of rock music’s defining sounds.
That distorted guitar sound on “You Really Got Me” came from an experiment by Dave Davies of The Kinks, who, dissatisfied with its sound, slashed the speaker cone of a small Elpico amplifier bought in a Muswell Hill radio spares shop, and ran it through a Vox AC30.
The raw tone became hugely influential, helping shape hard rock, punk, heavy metal, and grunge.
After years of conflict, the Davies brothers dissolved The Kinks in 1996.
In late 1996, the band gathered for what turned out to be the last time - at a party for Dave Davies's 50th birthday held at The Clissold Arms.
Dave Davies ran a solo concert at Islington Assembly Hall on 18 December 2015. He was joined on stage at the end of the show by his brother, Ray. Together they performed, “You Really Got Me”.
In between The Kinks first gig December 1960 and the last full band gathering in 1996, both at The Clissold Arms, came The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a knighthood for Ray in 2017, an album called Muswell Hillbillies that NME would rank among the greatest British records ever made, and the invention of the guitar sound on which half of modern rock was built.
The Clissold Arms remains open today, with a Kinks-themed room filled with memorabilia celebrating The Kinks and their first performance there in 1960. Across the road stands 6 Denmark Terrace, where Ray and Dave Davies grew up. Muswell Hill may not have produced The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, but it helped create the distorted guitar sound that transformed rock music.
A short walk from The Clissold Arms stands the Grade II* listed Everyman Cinema, originally opened as the Odeon in 1936 - the same year the BBC began television broadcasts from Alexandra Palace. Designed by architect George Coles for Odeon founder Oscar Deutsch, it is regarded by Historic England as the chain’s finest surviving interior, with lavish Art Deco detailing and a ceiling designed to resemble unspooling film. Together with The Kinks landmarks and Edwardian streetscape, it reflects Muswell Hill’s strong sense of heritage.
On 9 December 1979, former barrister Tim Martin opened his first pub on Colney Hatch Lane in Muswell Hill, converting a former bookmaker’s into Martin’s Free House. He later renamed the business Wetherspoons, after a New Zealand teacher known for struggling to control his class. Though the original venue has disappeared, the company grew into one of Britain’s largest pub chains.
At the top of Muswell Hill on the edge of the village sits a beautiful old building with a large bottle hanging outside. This is The Mossy Well pub, Muswell Hill's Weatherspoons pub of today.
The building had been used for the Express Dairy, a chalet style building erected with its 1900 date marked clearly in the Gable plaster work. The founder of the company, George Barum, had chosen the company's name to symbolize his pioneerinG transport of milk by express train in special urns that he'd designed.
The dairy in Muswell Hill had a large milk depot for the horses and carts, plus a tea room in which the genteel could seek refreshment. And the building that the Weatherspoons pub currently occupies, you guessed it, that was the very tea rooms and former dairy.
When you walk by, stop to read the plaque on the Iron Gatepost. It sets out the story of the old building concisely and accurately.
And thank you, Weatherspoons, for doing that.
Muswell Hill no longer has a railway, but the old line survives as The Parkland Walk, London’s longest local nature reserve.
Built along the former Edgware, Highgate and London Railway, opened in 1867, with a branch up to Alexandra Palace added in 1873.
This railway branch closed to passengers in 1954. Its route is now filled with woodland and wildflowers. The 4.5-mile path runs through deep cuttings and across a seventeen-arch viaduct with wide views across London.
Muswell Hill’s lack of a Tube station is the result of an abandoned plan. In the 1930s, London Transport intended to incorporate the area’s railway into the Northern Line as part of the Northern Heights plan to electrify the old surface lines north of Highgate and absorb them into the Northern Line.
Work began, but the Second World War halted progress, and post-war funding went to the Central Line extensions instead. The scheme was cancelled in 1950, passenger services ended in 1954, and Muswell Hill station was later demolished.
The Northern Heights plan was officially cancelled in 1950. Passenger services to Muswell Hill station ended in 1954. Platforms were demolished and Muswell Hill Primary School now occupies the site.
Pull up a London Underground map from 1948. The branch to Alexandra Palace is still marked Under Construction.
It never was. Constructed, that is.
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