Soundshaft

The Soundshaft was a small club attached to Heaven at Charing Cross, with its own entrance on Hungerford Lane behind Craven Street, though it could also be reached directly from Heaven's main space. While Heaven operated as London's largest and most famous gay club through the 1980s and 1990s, the Soundshaft ran as an intimate sister venue where some of the most significant nights in British gay dance culture took place.

Its most celebrated tenant was Troll, the Saturday acid house night that ran from 1988 to 1990 and launched the careers of DJs Daz Saund and Luke Slater. Paul Oakenfold ran Future at the Soundshaft on Thursdays, one of the first London nights to champion Balearic and house sounds; at the end of those evenings, the doors connecting the Soundshaft to Heaven's main room were opened and the two crowds merged for the final songs – one of the rituals of that era and a model for how the underground and the mainstream gay scene could briefly become the same thing.

Later nights at the Soundshaft included Sherbet and Fahrenheit, a hard house night run by Fevah that operated in the late 1990s and early 2000s, by which time the music policy of the Soundshaft had moved considerably further from the Balearic warmth of its origins.

The Soundshaft is now The Stage Bar.