For sale: House where Pink Floyd formed being sold for first time in decades

For sale: House where Pink Floyd formed being sold for first time in decades

- Highgate house where Pink Floyd  began is on the market for £1.2m

The north London home where Syd Barrett, Roger Waters and Nick Mason formed Pink Floyd has come up for sale for the first time since they lodged there in the Sixties.

The three-storey house, which has barely been altered since then, is being auctioned on September 20 with a guide price of £1.2 million and needs total refurbishment.

It was at the property — in Stanhope Gardens, Highgate — that the young musicians developed the psychedelic sound and look that was to propel them to superstardom.

The Victorian home was owned until his death this year by their influential former college tutor and landlord Mike Leonard, who was also briefly a member of the band that evolved into Pink Floyd.

Rock experts said the house played a crucial role in the formation of the group that went on to record huge selling concept albums such as Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and the rock opera The Wall.

Mark Blake, author of Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story Of Pink Floyd, said: “It was a very good environment for young student musicians to be living. It gave somewhere for them to live and somewhere to rehearse with a sympathetic landlord who did not mind about them making a noise. This is where Pink Floyd started to come together.”

Mason, who became the group’s drummer, and bass guitar player Waters are believed to have moved into the downstairs self-contained flat in September 1963, while early lead singer Barrett arrived about a year later. Barrett was put in charge of catering  — with a budget of 20p a day. Keyboard player Richard Wright also lodged at the house.

The dusty interiors still retain much evidence of the avant-garde musical influences that Mr Leonard — a lecturer at Hornsey College of Art — introduced to the rhythm and blues band then known as The Tea Set.

Instruments such as bongo drums, tambourines and a huge homemade xylophone lie scattered around as well as the spotlights, prisms and crystals that were an influence.

In the attic there is a rare Binson Echorec 2 echo unit. The Binson was used by Barrett and later by David Gilmore to develop the Floyd sound. Leonard’s workshop, where he designed and built the complex “lysergenic” lighting systems that contributed to Pink Floyd’s image and featured in a Tomorrow’s World BBC broadcast from the house in 1968, has also survived.

In a recent interview Mason said that the bonnet of his Aston Martin is buried in the overgrown garden.

Chris Coleman Smith, of Savills Auctions, which is handling the sale at the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, said the sale was a rare opportunity to buy an unmodernised family house in Highgate.  He added: “Who knows, we might get some Pink Floyd fan flying in to buy it.

By Jonathan Prynn, Consumer Business Editor, 10 September 2012

Pic: Lucy Young

From www.standard.co.uk