Also known as
Club Hotel, Club Tavern, Churchills Live
Location
Corner of Battersea Street and Colombo Street (54 Battersea Street), Sydenham, Christchurch.
Current Status
Operating. Churchill’s Tavern continues to trade as a licensed tavern and live music venue, with regular national touring acts and local bills.
Active years
1882–present (as Club Hotel / Club Tavern from 1882; Churchill’s Tavern confirmed by 2010).
Capacity
~250.
History
Churchill’s Tavern sits on the corner of Battersea Street and Colombo Street in Sydenham, in a building with one of the longer continuous licensed histories in Christchurch. The Club Hotel was built on the site in 1882 by Stephen Lawrence at a cost of £3,000, the bulk of which was borrowed from the brewery. The Lawrence family ran the hotel for over a century; the 1982 centennial was marked with crowds of two to three hundred people packing the lounge bar for housie sessions six nights a week.
The hotel traded for a period as the Club Tavern before adopting the Churchill’s Tavern name, confirmed in use by at least 2010. A major refurbishment in the mid-2010s brought a new PA system, a beer garden, and eighteen gaming machines. The fit-out repositioned the venue as one of the more serious live music rooms in the city’s south end.
Churchill’s emerged from the 2010–11 Canterbury earthquake sequence as one of the few surviving pub-based live music venues in central Christchurch. The earthquakes closed or destroyed many comparable spaces, leaving Churchill’s as the primary home for rock, punk, and metal touring in the city. Promoters including Valhalla Touring, DRW Entertainment, and ODR Productions use the venue as the Christchurch stop on national tours, pairing it with Whammy Bar and the Powerstation in Auckland and Valhalla and Bodega in Wellington.
The confirmed international bill runs wide. American hard rockers Skid Row and Ugly Kid Joe played a joint headline show in April 2014. UK punk veterans Bad Manners brought their 40th anniversary tour in October 2016 and The Exploited played their own 40-year anniversary tour at the venue in March 2020. Bauhaus co-founders Peter Murphy and David J performed In the Flat Field in full in October 2018, as part of the Bauhaus Ruby 40-year celebration. Desert rock figures Yawning Man and Brant Bjork have both played the room, as have Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers on solo tour (May 2019) and Ross the Boss with his Hail to England 35th anniversary show (November 2019). Wellington metal institution Sticky Filth played their first South Island show in twenty years at Churchill’s in November 2019.
In the extreme and heavy metal sphere the venue has hosted The Ocean (February 2019), Bølzer (January 2018), Cattle Decapitation on their New Zealand Extinction Tour (February 2018), Aborted with Archspire on the Terror Vision NZ Tour (September 2018), Polaris (August 2019), Cockney Rejects on their first ever New Zealand tour (October 2019), and Disentomb. The venue’s capacity of 250, concert-grade PA, and 3am licence make it one of few Christchurch rooms suited to the scale of international club touring. Churchill’s continues to book local and regional acts alongside touring internationals, and runs regular DJ and karaoke nights.
Links
- setlist.fm
- Club Hotel Sydenham – Stephen Symons’ history of Christchurch pubs