This year’s edition of the Global Legal Hackathon London just wrapped last night, with a worthy winner, and 2 runners up, from the 8 teams that coalesced and competed over the weekend.  Actually all 8 solutions pitched were great. I’ll write more about the event and the outcomes in the next few days, but I though I’d start with how the event was connected to some serious 1960s London rock history. 

Like last year Agile Elephant and Cambridge Strategy Group co-hosted, but with Wavelength Law too.  The event grew globally from 40 cities to 47 this year, and London grew too. This year’s venue was kindly provided by University of Westminster Law School at 4-12, Little Titchfield Street in the Fitzrovia area of central London.  They gave us their big auditorium, plus a room called Portland Hall and a dozen classrooms. The hall has rock history significance which I didn’t realise until we started doing the set up with Alan their AV guy:

Pink Floyd 

Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Richard Wright were all architecture students at The Polytechnic (which subsequently became UoW). They met there in 1963 and formed a band with some others which they called Sigma 6.  The band first rehearsed and played on that very stage in Portland Hall.  Band members and name changes came and went. By 1965 Syd Barrett had joined and they had become the Tea Set.  At some gig that year there was another band with the same name so Syd has to make up a name on the spot and he picked the first names of two blues players he admired Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, becoming the Pink Floyd Sound.  But it all started in Portland Hall.

Jimi Hendrix and Cream

On 1 October 1966 Cream were playing the Polytechnic on stage at Portland Hall. just a week after manager Chas Chandler brought Jimi Hendrix to the UK to launch his career.  Chas talked to Cream apparently saying “I’ve got this friend who would love to jam with you.”  They let him on stage and played Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Killing Floor’.  Eric Clapton is quoted as saying:

“He got up and blew everyone’s mind. I just thought ‘ahh, someone that plays the stuff I love in the flesh, on stage with me. I was actually privileged to be (on stage with him)… it’s something that no one is ever going to beat; that incident, that night, it’s historic in my mind but only a few people are alive that would remember it.”

There should be a plaque somewhere there, but there isn’t.