The Walton Hop

For over three decades, a disco held in a converted Victorian power house gave several generations of Walton teenagers their first taste of live music and, for a few, their first taste of performing. The Walton Hop’s story is genuinely significant to the town’s cultural history, and it is also, in its later years, tangled up with a serious criminal case that has to be reported accurately rather than skated over.

The Playhouse

The Hop was held at the Playhouse on Hurst Grove, the same building that had originally served as the power house for Cecil Hepworth’s pioneering film studio, converted into a performance venue in 1925. That earlier history gives the building a genuine claim to having shaped British popular culture twice over, first as part of one of the country’s most important early film studios, and later as the stage for a disco that ran from the late 1950s until 1990.

The Hop years

Through its long run, the Walton Hop functioned as the town’s main teenage social venue, a regular fixture for young people from Walton and Hersham alike, with miming contests a recurring feature of its programme. It was the kind of venue that, almost by accident, put a generation of local teenagers in front of an audience for the first time, some of them years before anyone had heard of them.

The bands that passed through

The Hop’s best-documented connection to music history runs through Sham 69. Before he fronted the punk band, a teenage Jimmy Pursey performed at the Hop with his earlier covers band, Jimmy & The Ferrets, miming to Bay City Rollers and Rolling Stones records at the venue’s regular miming contests years before Sham 69’s run of chart hits in the late 1970s.

Its later history

The Hop’s story took a serious turn in its final years. In 2000, the record producer Jonathan King, a well-known figure who had frequented the venue, was arrested and later charged with historic sexual offences. It is important to state the facts precisely, because they are often reported loosely: King was convicted in 2001 of six offences against five boys committed between 1983 and 1987, for which he was sentenced to seven years. Contemporary reports of that trial stated that some of the victims had been approached or picked up at the Walton Hop, although the assaults themselves took place elsewhere. A later and separate prosecution, brought in 2018, concerned further alleged offences said to be connected to the Hop; that trial collapsed without any conviction, with some charges resulting in not-guilty verdicts and the remaining charges stayed as an abuse of process after the judge found significant and repeated disclosure failings in the police investigation, for which Surrey Police apologised. The exact indictment and trial transcript have not been reviewed for this article, so the precise relationship of each count to the venue is not stated here.

The building today

The Playhouse survives and remains in use, carrying its dual history as both the birthplace of an early British film studio’s power supply and, decades later, the venue for one of Surrey’s longest-running teenage discos. The Hop itself closed in 1990, but its place in the personal histories of the people who went there, and in the earliest chapter of Sham 69’s story, has outlasted the venue’s closing night by well over thirty years.