Indica Gallery

The Indica Gallery was a counterculture art gallery and bookshop that operated in London from November 1965 to November 1967. Located in the basement at 6 Mason's Yard, off Duke Street in St James's, it became a pivotal centre of the city's underground culture during the Swinging Sixties. Founded by John Dunbar, Barry Miles, and Peter Asher, with financial and creative support from Paul McCartney, the Indica is most widely remembered as the venue where John Lennon first encountered Yoko Ono in November 1966. Though it survived only two years before closing for financial reasons, its brief existence intersected with some of the most significant figures and movements in British avant-garde art and popular music.

The Indica originated from the convergence of two separate plans. Barry Miles had been running the alternative bookshop and happenings venue Better Books, but with new owners taking over, he sought to establish his own bookstore and cultural venue. Through Paolo Leonni, he met John Dunbar, who had recently completed his art studies and was planning to open a gallery. They brought in Peter Asher as a silent partner for financing, and together formed Miles, Asher and Dunbar Limited (MAD) to launch Indica Books and Gallery in September 1965. Dunbar discovered the empty premises at 6 Mason's Yard, a courtyard that also housed the Scotch of St James club, where he was then living with his girlfriend Marianne Faithfull. The name Indica was chosen as a reference to Cannabis indica. The gallery opened in November 1965 and quickly established itself as a hub for radical avant-garde programming. In the summer of 1966, the bookshop separated from the gallery and relocated to 102 Southampton Row, taking over a lease from William Jackson Books Limited. The gallery itself closed in November 1967 due to financial difficulties.

The Indica Gallery's programming centred on conceptual art, happenings, and avant-garde experimentation. The Observer noted that it organised some of the most avant-garde shows then visible in London. Its exhibitions embraced interactivity and conceptual strategies rather than traditional painting and sculpture. This orientation toward radical, participatory art placed the Indica at the forefront of London's emerging underground culture, connecting visual art with the broader countercultural movements of the period.

The gallery's most historically significant exhibition was Yoko Ono's "Unfinished Paintings," which ran from 8 to 18 November 1966. Co-owner John Dunbar had seen Ono's performance of Cut Piece at the Destruction in Art Symposium in September 1966 and invited her to mount a show at the Indica. Artist Adrian Hall assisted Ono in installing the exhibition. The show included Apple, which Lennon initially liked, and Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting, an interactive work that impressed him with its positivity. This preview evening on 7 November 1966 is widely cited as the occasion when Lennon and Ono first met, though this claim is disputed by Miles and others. In 2006, the Riflemaker Gallery on Beak Street staged an exhibition revisiting the Indica forty years after its closure, featuring original artists including Liliane Lijn, Boyle Family/Mark Boyle, and Carlos Cruz-Diez, alongside younger artists whose work related to ideas first presented there. This exhibition later travelled to New York's Nyehaus gallery in late 2007 as "Nyehaus becomes Indica."

The Indica Gallery occupied the basement of 6 Mason's Yard, a location in St James's just off Duke Street and near Piccadilly Circus. The basement space beneath the Indica Bookshop provided an appropriately subterranean setting for the gallery's countercultural activities. The courtyard location also placed it in proximity to the Scotch of St James club, reinforcing its position within a network of alternative cultural venues in central London. When the bookshop separated from the gallery in summer 1966, it moved to 102 Southampton Row, the former premises of William Jackson Books Limited, where the flat above the shop became a gathering place for figures associated with the Indica circle.

The Indica Gallery no longer exists as a physical venue. Its original location at 6 Mason's Yard, City of Westminster, was operational only from November 1965 to November 1967. The bookshop continuation at 102 Southampton Row served as a separate entity where the International Times newspaper was founded in the basement, and where John Lennon and Paul McCartney reportedly rehearsed a song later recorded as "Tomorrow Never Knows" for the Revolver album. The Indica's legacy is now maintained through archival documentation and retrospective exhibitions rather than any continuous institutional presence.