The Sound Lounge, London

The Sound Lounge
	The Sound Lounge exterior and outdoor seating area
Location	216-220 Sutton High Street, Sutton, London, SM1 1NU
Public transit	Train: Sutton station. Buses: 80, 164, 280, S1
Opened	2020
Website
	www.thesoundlounge.org.uk

The Sound Lounge is a grassroots live music venue on Sutton High Street in Sutton, South London. The venue hosts live performances of blues, Americana, folk and roots music.^[1] It incorporates a plant-based, carbon-neutral café and a vinyl record shop, and hosts visual art exhibitions, theatre and dance.^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]

The venue's previous locations were first Tooting, then Wimbledon and then Morden before occupying the former premises of Sutton's Royal Bank of Scotland.^[6]

Following the easing of lockdown, the Sutton and Morden venues had a limited opening in April 2021 for outdoor food and drink consumption and, at the Sutton venue, vinyl record sales at the Union Music Store within. A women's theatre event took place in June 2021, and Sunday jazz afternoons with vegan roast are planned. In addition to its normal meal sales, the venue works in conjunction with Time Out Youth Project at the Sutton Life Centre to provide free meals for young people with food insecurity. Plans for the future include the installation of a community garden, free hot drinks for local residents suffering from social isolation, and activities for pre-school children. They also plan to provide training for disadvantaged people aiming to become baristas and sound engineers.^[7]

On 1 July 2021 the venue became the country's first grassroots music venue to be certified as carbon neutral. A wide variety of measures have been put in place to achieve neutrality. In addition to the fully plant-based menu for the café, these include getting all energy from renewable sources, not sending any waste to landfill and maintaining an allotment garden on site for zero-carbon produce for the café.^[8]