Nearly 20,000 Reviews and Still the Worst-Kept Secret in London
There is something philosophically troubling about a comedy club called the Top Secret that has accumulated 19,363 Google reviews. At what point does a secret stop being a secret? At five hundred reviews, perhaps you retain some plausible deniability. At five thousand, you are pushing it. At nearly twenty thousand, you are not a secret — you are a landmark, a tourist attraction, and possibly a subject for doctoral research in the sociology of urban entertainment. And yet the Top Secret Comedy Club persists with its branding, undaunted by the contradiction, and frankly they are right to do so because the name works and the comedy is excellent.
What Makes the Top Secret Comedy Club So Popular?
The Top Secret Comedy Club operates from two central London locations — a basement venue near Covent Garden and a second room at 23 Kingsway — and has built its formidable reputation on two pillars: extraordinary value and consistently strong line-ups. Entry fees can drop as low as £1 on certain nights. One pound. The price of approximately one third of a standard London bus fare, or one sixty-fourth of a central London parking meter hour. For this sum, you receive a full evening of professional stand-up comedy from experienced circuit acts in a no-frills basement atmosphere that strips away every pretension and puts the focus entirely on whether the person holding the microphone is actually funny.
The answer, most nights, is yes. The booking team at the Top Secret has developed a reputation for identifying circuit talent that is genuinely strong rather than merely available, and the result is a programme that consistently punches above its price point. This is not the Edinburgh Fringe lineup, and it is not the Comedy Store on a Saturday night, but it is real comedy performed by real comedians who know what they are doing, and at the price point the Top Secret operates, it is essentially impossible to complain.
The Covent Garden Location
The original Top Secret Comedy Club, near Covent Garden, has 19,363 reviews at a 4.9-star rating — making it, by volume, the highest-rated comedy club operation in London. The basement venue is small enough to feel intimate without being so small that you spend the evening smelling a stranger’s hair. The sight lines are good from most seats, the bar operates at a pace that suggests someone has thought carefully about throughput, and the compères are reliably good at warming up the room without eating into the acts’ time.
The location is ideal: a short walk from Covent Garden Underground, in a part of London where the streets are full of people who have already decided they want entertainment and are simply trying to work out what form it should take. The Top Secret catches a significant proportion of these people, takes their £1 to £15, and sends them home having laughed considerably more than they expected.
The Kingsway Location
The second Top Secret venue, at 23 Kingsway in Holborn, operates with the same formula as its sibling and has accumulated nearly 2,000 reviews at 4.9 stars in considerably less time, suggesting that the model transplants well. The Kingsway room tends to attract a slightly different crowd — more office workers, more people who have just finished something in the area, fewer tourists who have been pointed in its direction by a hotel concierge. The comedy is of comparable quality, the prices are similarly improbable, and the atmosphere is equally unpretentious.
Double Bills and Late Shows
On Friday and Saturday nights, both Top Secret locations offer double bills — two full sets of stand-up for a price that still manages to undercut most of the competition. The late shows, which run until around 10:30pm, are a reliable option for people who have already eaten, seen something, or simply want to extend an evening without committing to anything too expensive. In a city where a round of drinks costs more than a theatre ticket in most provincial towns, the Top Secret’s pricing model feels almost transgressive.
The Verdict
The Top Secret Comedy Club is, by almost every measurable metric, the most successful comedy club operation in London. Its review volume is unmatched, its ratings are near-perfect, its prices are astonishing for the quality on offer, and its locations are ideal. If you are visiting London and want to see stand-up comedy without spending a significant portion of your holiday budget on a single evening, the Top Secret is your answer. If you are a Londoner who has somehow never been, you have been subsidising the West End theatre industry when you should have been in a Covent Garden basement laughing for a pound. Rectify this immediately.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
Megan Amram is a standup comedian based in Portland, OR. She is a native of North London.
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