Sneaky Pete's is a 100-capacity music venue and nightclub on the Cowgate in Edinburgh's Old Town, widely regarded as one of the most important grassroots venues in Scotland. Despite its tiny size, it operates as both a gig venue, staging around 250 shows a year, and a busy club open most nights of the week. The venue dates to 2008, when Nick Stewart took over a small shots bar called the Red Vodka Club, just around the corner from the Cabaret Voltaire that had first made him a manager. After much rebuilding, what began as an unlikely tiny club grew into a serious gig venue as bookings and ambition increased. For so small a room, its track record is remarkable: Sneaky Pete's has served as an early launchpad for artists including Young Fathers and Lewis Capaldi, and its reputation as a dance space led DJ Magazine to name it among the most important clubs in the world, alongside the likes of Ministry of Sound and Berghain. Running both live music and club nights means the venue can sell out twice in a single night, and it is frequently full, putting well over a thousand people through its doors in a busy week. It won Music Week's Grassroots Music Venue Award in 2019 and topped a leading magazine's annual list of Scottish cultural highlights the same year. Like many small venues it has fought long battles over noise complaints, an issue that has closed comparable spaces elsewhere in the city, and campaigning by venues like it helped shift soundproofing obligations onto new developments. As one of the few remaining independent music venues in Edinburgh, Sneaky Pete's holds an outsized place in the city's cultural life. Its outsized reputation rests on a willingness to take risks on emerging artists and on the intensity that only a tiny, packed room can generate, qualities that keep big-name DJs returning long after they could fill far larger venues. As pressures on grassroots venues have mounted across the country, Sneaky Pete's has become both a celebrated success story and a reminder of how precarious small independent spaces can be.

Type: NightClub

Address: 73 Cowgate, Edinburgh, United Kingdom, EH1 1JW

Website: https://www.sneakypetes.co.uk

Opening Date: 01/01/2008