The Cavern Club once told John Lennon to cut out the rock

In 1957 the Cavern was a jazz club in a cellar on Mathew Street in Liverpool. Skiffle was allowed, because the club counted it as an offshoot of jazz. Rock 'n' roll was not.

That year a skiffle group called the Quarrymen got a booking there. On stage John Lennon led them into rock 'n' roll. He started an Elvis Presley song, and the others had to follow. The owner, Alan Sytner, sent Lennon a note telling them to cut out the bloody rock.

The cellar had been an air raid shelter under a warehouse where tropical fruit was stored. The street was the center of Liverpool's wholesale fruit and vegetable market. On packed nights the bricks sweated, and the fruit smell they had soaked up stayed on people's clothes.

In 1959 Sytner sold the club to Ray McFall, and beat groups moved in. The Beatles first played there in February 1961, back from Hamburg. In November that year Brian Epstein, who ran a local record shop, came to a lunchtime show and soon became their manager. Their last show at the Cavern was in August 1963, by which time the club was too small for the crowds.

In 1973 British Rail bought the warehouses above the club to build a ventilation shaft for Liverpool's new underground railway. The Cavern closed that May, and the cellar was filled in. The shaft was never built, and the site became a car park.

In the early 1980s there were plans to dig the old cellar out and reopen it. In 1982 the architect announced that it could not be done, because the arches had been too badly damaged when the buildings above came down.

The club was rebuilt instead, with 15,000 bricks from the old site, and opened in 1984. It covers about 70 percent of the original floor plan, turned 90 degrees. Another 5,000 bricks were sold for £5 each, and the money went to a children's home called Strawberry Field.

The new club's fire exit, on Mathew Street, is where the old entrance used to be.