Venue: The Charlotte
Town: Leicester, GB

The Charlotte was a pub and concert venue in Leicester, England, on the edge of the city centre, on Oxford Street, opposite De Montfort University. It was a nationally recognised music venue on the UK's 'toilet circuit', hosting bands such as Blur, Oasis, Coldplay, Radiohead, the Arctic Monkeys and Kasabian before they found widespread acclaim. The first ever live performance of Creep, which became an international hit for Radiohead, was at the Charlotte. The pub was originally named the Princess Charlotte, in honour of the daughter of George IV. The earliest known record of the pub dates back to 1815. Princess Charlotte herself died two years later. In 1853, landlord Moses Wilby was convicted of an assault on a customer. Henry Finley had been quarrelling with his wife in the pub, and when Wilby asked them to leave, Finley "struck him under the ear". Wilby then knocked him down. He was fined 10s or 14 days imprisonment. William and Sarah Kellam took the pub from Wilby in 1857, and a year later William was fined for serving after hours. In defence, he had claimed he had fallen asleep and hadn't realised the time. Sarah Kellam died after a botched backstreet abortion in 1860. On her death bed, she accused Elizabeth Goddard, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. But a partial pardon, signed by Queen Victoria, commuted the sentence to a life of penal servitude. In 1976, the pub featured in an edition of the ITV current affairs programme This Week on alleged infiltration of Territorial Army units by the National Front. A clip was shown of the pub, saying a local NF group met there. But the then-licensee told the Leicester Mercury the group had been barred from the pub. The Princess Charlotte began hosting live music in the late 1970s, when it was home to the Leicester Traditional Music Club. Gary Warren took over as landlord in 1985 and started putting on regular gigs, though he told the Mercury he was having trouble finding local bands to support touring g