The Albion Rooms: the chaotic home of The Libertines
Today, The Albion Rooms is a hotel. In the coastal town of Margate, rapidly becoming ‘Hackney-on-Sea’ for its (relatively) cheap rents and general vibe of carefree artistry, The Albion Rooms stands today as a sensible money-making venture, a pension plan for the people involved in the long-standing business known as The Libertines. Once the most notorious rock band in England, ‘The Libs’ of 2025 are putting their effort into ensuring the light fittings and furnishings fit their unmistakable aesthetic of poetic, elegantly wasted Anglicana.
If I’m sounding a little dismissive of this project, I honestly don’t mean to. For all the incredible stories and even more incredible music that make up the early years of The Libertines, it wasn’t worth the ungodly mental and physical trauma that wreaked havoc on the band. It’s a miracle that Carl Barat made it through and that Peter Doherty is alive and… as well as he can be in 2025, which might as well prove that at some point in the early 2000s, a wish-granting genie roamed the streets of Dalston. It certainly explains the phrase “Reading Festival headliners Razorlight”.
It would take a cold-hearted son of a bitch to bemoan the careerist turn The Libertines’ history took in the 2020s. However, there is something truly surreal about what The Albion Rooms means today because it didn’t always mean a fairly upmarket B&B. For years, The Albion Rooms was 112a, Teesdale Street, Bethnal Green, the flat that Pete ‘n’ Carl shared when their band was getting off the ground. A site that, during its good times, saw some of the greatest moments in the history of British indie rock. During the bad, it saw more needles than a Christmas tree market.
Often, these good and bad times were one and the same. Fitting for a band named The Libertines, Doherty and Barat were two men committed to living life in the extremes. What’s more, they wanted the people who understood them to join them in those extremes.
How did The Libertines get their fans involved?
What I want to say is that this article isn’t actually a massive invasion of their privacy or of the people living at 112a now. In fact, I’m a quarter century behind what the Time Lord-style ‘twin hearts’ of The Libertines were doing during their prime. They were putting their address online and telling anyone interested to turn up. In their case, they were doing it for their most die-hard fans to pay a tenner at the door, come up to their flat and have a good old-fashioned sing-song. Whether the neighbours were ok with this or not didn’t factor into the thought process.
Now, if you want to be charitable to ‘The Likely Lads’, they were doing this because their vision of Albion was an inclusive one. They wanted to share their vision with as many people as possible, and so they made themselves available to their fans. This was, after all, a band whose members could frequently be found chatting with fans on their online forums. If they weren’t around, it was almost certainly because they had a mardy dealer breathing down their necks and needed cash quickly.
All the same, these secret gigs looked like a seedy, nightmarishly good time. That is until a few uninvited guests turned up. At first, it was the neighbours. Understandably apoplectic that they had to put up with a drug-fuelled rock concert in the wee hours of a weekday morning. When they went unheard, the knocking became altogether more troublesome. It was the plods, and they weren’t any happier news than the neighbours.
There’s a video of this happening that, if you’re a ‘Libs’ fan, you’ve almost certainly seen. It’s just as well there’s video proof of this happening because it would be dismissed as total fantasy if it wasn’t. Pete ‘n’ Carl were standing, strumming their guitars for a rapt audience, before a neighbour suddenly appeared at the door, flanked by a couple of cops. The rozzers demanded to know whose flat it was and, as if the whole escapade wasn’t Beano enough, Pete and Carl pointed at the other.
The cops start ordering everyone out of the building. As they did so, Pete looked at Carl, Carl looked at Pete, and together they launched into the opening bars of The Clash’s ‘The Guns Of Brixton’. At least they tried to. They got as far as, “when they kick out your front door / how you gonna come? / with your hands around your head…” before a stern look from the cops made them shut their traps before finishing the lyrics. Probably for the best, to be honest.
Just like everything else to do with The Libertines at their prime, it’s amazing and decadent, and if it lasted any longer, terrible things would happen. Pete and Carl left the original Albion Rooms in 2004 (with a farewell gig to celebrate, natch), but the rot had fully set in. The after-effects of what they had created in The Albion Rooms would stay with them for years, contributing to the worst years of both young men’s lives.
There are some who would say that taking its name and turning it into a fairly posh hotel is a betrayal of everything the original Albion Rooms stood for. I actually wouldn’t disagree with that. However, considering it’s a sign that, for the first time in many years, Peter Doherty and Carl Barat seem to be genuinely planning for a future in which both of them live, I would rather ask whether that’s a bad thing or not.
