West Indian Gazette's offices/Theo’s Record Store

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Amy Ashwood-Garvey. In the West Indian Gazette's offices at 250 Brixton Road, 
Jones received guests at all hours. Downstairs was London's first black music shop, 
where Jamaican mento and boogie by Laurel Aitken and Monty Reynolds sold in quantities. 
The Barbadian cricketer Gary Sobers, Hinds recalled, made a point of getting off the bus at the
 record shop during the 1963 Test at Lord's.


​Theo's Record Store/ West Indian Gazette Office
1959Theo’s Record Store is said to be one of the oldest black owned record stores in London. And it is a little known fact that the West Indian Gazzete (a reputable Caribbean focused newspaper founded in Brixton by the activist Claudia Jones) ran it’s offices above the record store from 1959! The store owner Theo Campbell actually wrote the sports section of the newspaper and later went on to launch his own magazine called JOFFA. 
Naturally as many could imagine the Record store soon came to be a hub that attracted a variety of politicians/activist related individuals and groups, such as visiting politicians from the West Indian Federation. It is also said that Martin Luther King West Indian Gazette’s office in 1964, when he was passing through London on his way to Oslo to collect his Nobel Peace Prize!