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The Hard Rock Cafe Vault Museum I'm not a huge fan of the Hard Rock Cafe, simply because I prefer not to globalise my food experience when I travel, but recently I found an article in one of our national newspapers that the Hard Rock in London is the proud owner of a vault museum, filled with rock memorabilia. After reading this, the only thing left for me to do was, of course, go and check it out. The vault museum is located in the Hard Rock Store, which sits across the street from the actual Hard Rock Cafe. It can only be visited when accompanied by one of the guides, and there are tours twice an hour, every hour. But  just ask and if you're lucky you might just get a private guided tour. As did I. My guide explained to me that the building that houses the Hard Rock Store used to be a bank and the vault is what's left over from those days. No stacks of gold plates and bundles of money in this vault, this one is of course stacked with rock paraphernalia donated by the artists themselves or bought in auctions and put down here because there's no room to display it in the restaurant. There's Slash' guitar and the outfit he wore in the Guns 'n Roses November Rain video, you'll see Sting's Fender Precision Bass guitar which he played in the video for After the Rain Has Fallen, and Madonna's iconic JP Gaultier bustier is on display as well as one of her old credit cards.

It's quite a small display and I wasn't down there for very long, but I figured that an old bank vault filled with a bunch of guitars once owned by famous rock-stars is definitely worth a nosy around. Especially if it's free.




