A nine-bedroom Georgian townhouse in St John's Wood, bought by the Gramophone Company in 1929 and converted into the world's first purpose-built recording studios. It opened as EMI Studios on 12 November 1931 and spent three decades as a largely classical and light-entertainment room before a resident house band with a residency deal changed what the building was for — by the time EMI renamed it Abbey Road Studios in the 1970s, in honor of the album, the in-house engineering staff and custom-built consoles had already reshaped what a recording studio could do for everyone who came after. Every Console chapter recorded there, in the order the sessions happened.