Reports of the death of nightlife may be greatly exaggerated.
In recent months we’ve heard about new clubs opening in Peckham and Brixton, an audio upgrade at Tola and plans for a DIY venue in Catford. Even the Old Blue Last is good again! Yet the official figures paint a depressing picture – hundreds of venues lost in recent years, along with thousands of jobs.
So which narrative is right? To inspect the situation, nightlife chronicler and Party Lines author Ed Gillett returns to the podcast fresh from his contribution to the London Nightlife Taskforce report.
The report’s 23 recommendations are the result of a year-long consultation after the binning of the night czar role previously held by Amy Lamé. As well as introducing the spiciest elements of the report, Ed talks to us about noise, crime, gentrification and the closure of Corsica Studios, and expands on his concern that a discourse of decline might be doing more harm than good. Full transcript below for those who prefer to read all about it.
Plus, Chal reports back from the Green Party Party at Heaven, a fundraiser-slash-rally for Zack Polanski’s insurgent electoral movement. Are we really letting Lobsta B lead the green revolution?
In other news: Tom and Chal will be hosting a handful of listening sessions at the Devon Turnbull OJAS listening room at 180 Studios on the Strand. The first instalment sold out before we had time to tell you – what the fuck, guys! – and will see us joined by Call Super and Parris for a swanky audiophile experience on 16th March. More events coming later in the year!
And in case you missed it, Chal went long on the grim fairytale that was Britney Spears’ conservatorship for the London Review of Books. Bookmark it!
You can still buy our book, No Tags Vol 2: Conversations on underground music culture, featuring interviews from the second year of the podcast and five brand new articles. It’s available from our Shopify and certain cool bookshops and record shops – tell your local bookseller that you want one.
We’ve been running No Tags for over two years. We do it around other jobs, we have no corporate backing, no sponsorship and we don’t even run ads on the podcast. If you’d like to support us, leave a positive review over at Apple Podcasts, share this post on Substack, or subscribe to our paid tier for £5 per month. No bonuses, just a happy glow.
CR: We thought we should start with a piece you wrote at the end of last year for The Quietus, which got to the core of a nagging thought that Tom and I have had recently. There’s a figure that gets mentioned a lot: nearly 800 late night venues have closed in the UK since 2020. And regardless of the statistics, there is definitely a palpable sense that club culture is not really the centre of youth culture anymore.
But at the same time I keep having really great nights out, and if I think back on the last few months there’s been consistent positive news – just today I saw Tola in Peckham announce a huge internal upgrade, Club Cheek has just opened in Brixton, the Sister Midnight collective are trying to open a venue in Catford. There’s a lot of activity, yet apparently nightlife is in decline. Which is it?
Ed Gillett: It’s both, really. The important thing to say is that this is not an attempt to invalidate people’s concerns or frustrations with the state of nightlife, either as culture or as an industry. The raw statistics on it remain very stark and very worrying. I was chatting to Mark David from Music Venues Trust the other day and their annual report, which came out a week or two ago, showed that something like 6,000 jobs had been lost from grassroots music venues over the course of 2025, which is about 25% of the workforce.
CR: In one year?
EG: Yeah. There are very serious issues around making the sums add up throughout the industry. The UK also lost a net of nine grassroots music venues over the course of 2025 – which is nine too many, but the way Mark described it was that this is the least worst number that they’ve had since before the pandemic, so there are nuances to it. The situation facing the industry is incredibly challenging, particularly economically. The costs involved in operating culture, putting nights on, running venues, being an artist, have all skyrocketed as other pressures on people’s disposable incomes have meant that there’s less money to go around. So the reality is that things are very difficult.
I wrote the piece for The Quietus because I felt like that wasn’t the only story. I’d had a series of conversations over the course of 2025 with people who had voiced, in varying degrees of overtness or subtleness, a certain amount of frustration with the fact that that seemed to be the only narrative that got attention. I don’t know to what extent this is my own online filter bubble, but I see that line repeated constantly across the media, across conversations. It seems to be accepted as gospel now as the only narrative that makes sense. The light bulb moment for me was interviewing the team at a new venue that was opening in East London [Will Paterson from the club Eutopia]. They mentioned that they had lost out on funding for this new venue because investors were under the impression that this was wasted money. The industry’s dying, so why would they bother supporting this?
That crystallised for me this idea that the more we talk about things falling apart, the harder it is to put in place alternatives or to build something that might survive those pressures, or be more resilient in the face of them. The more I spoke to people about that idea, the more I kept hearing the same thing back, which is that, yes, things are incredibly difficult, but there are also lots of great things going on.
Like you, Chal, I’ve had some of the best nights out in my life in recent years. I wouldn’t want to be complacent or look at things through rose-tinted glasses, but it’s possible for multiple things to be true at the same time. Despite these economic pressures, despite issues with noise and with planning and licensing, all of the things that go into making it harder for venues to survive, there are still incredible people running incredible spaces, building communities around these venues, around these nights, around different sounds and doing incredible things. I think there should be space in the conversation for that as well, but not as a means to diminish the negative experiences that other people are having.
Dance music has always operated in the margins, right? It has always been a relatively precarious industry and has often been subject to far greater political and social disapproval than it faces now. It has dealt with that. It managed to come through the other side of that. I wouldn’t want to romanticise that precariousness, but it’s not all doom and gloom. It’s only like 50% doom and gloom, and I think the conversation should reflect that, ideally.
TL: Obviously Corsica Studios closing down has been a huge headline in our sphere over the last few months. But you could argue that a venue like Corsica, which largely specialises in underground music, existing for almost 25 years in a capital city is potentially pretty good going. Is it part and parcel of a healthy, ever-evolving nightlife sector for venues to have a lifespan?
EG: Like most people in dance music in London, I knew that Corsica was going to be closing well before the news came out officially. I think it was something of an open secret. I think there was an understanding amongst dance music journalists who knew that, because Corsica was such a special place and because Adrian, who runs it, is just a fantastic person, that it was right to let them announce that on their own terms.
There was also an awareness that the negotiations around it were really complex. The issue with Corsica dates back at least a decade. When the plans were drawn up to redevelop all of Elephant and Castle, Corsica were not included in those initial conversations. When planning permission was put forward off the back of that masterplan they were having to play catch-up with the council and developers, who had essentially already signed off plans that didn’t account for the fact that there was a club on the premises and was going to be very close to the flats that had been given at least nominal approval to be built.
The root cause of it was gentrification, and councils taking their eye off the ball, and developers not being sufficiently attuned to the importance of retaining cultural spaces within changing neighbourhoods. Watching as the news broke in sort of semi-complete form, and everyone got very upset about the fact that Corsica was closing – what maybe wasn’t apparent was that between the Corsica team, the team at the GLA, the council and developers, they’d been able to agree a way forward that would involve Corsica being refitted, soundproofed and then reopened as a cultural space. It would be handed back, either to the existing Corsica team or to someone else, in 2027, and be protected as a cultural space moving forward with the appropriate mitigations to ensure that you wouldn’t get loads of noise complaints from the flats that would otherwise have been five metres from the smoking area.
The other thing is, you’re absolutely right, Corsica has been running for 24 years. Adrian started it with his partner, who passed away. There’s a lot of history there, there’s a lot of emotion there. 24 years for a club in that area of London is an incredible run, and very few clubs stay open that long. Even fewer stay open that long whilst retaining their identity and their spirit and remaining culturally relevant. As someone who had some of his most formative clubbing experiences in Corsica, it was a really emotional story for me to write. I remember talking to Adrian and feeling really churned up about it, both because I was sad at its closure, but also this sense of valediction that Corsica had done everything that it set out to do and more. A quarter of a century of late nights and trying to keep a space afloat takes its toll on anyone. I hope that comes through in the Guardian article I wrote about Corsica – that it had taken its toll on Adrian as well. Who knows what the future holds for that space, but I think there is something noble and beautiful about doing 24 really great years, going out on a high, not selling out to Live Nation, not watching something that you care about slowly become something that it isn’t.
TL: Do you know the average lifespan of a club in a city like London?
EG: I don’t I’m afraid, but that’s a really good question. The other one that I really want to find out is when the peak was in terms of nightclub numbers. The numbers tend to go back to about 2005, but it’s a little bit foggy before then. It would be interesting to know whether they peaked in the ‘90s, or the ‘80s, or the early 2000s, or earlier than that, even.
CR: We should move on to the main course, which is the London Nightlife Taskforce report. Remind us of exactly your role in it, who has actually commissioned it, and who it’s for.
EG: The first thing to say with all this is that I’m obviously speaking for myself, I am not a representative of the GLA, VibeLab, the taskforce or the commission.
CR: Address your complaints to Sadiq Khan, please.
EG: The London Nightlife Taskforce was set up by the mayor’s office, by Sadiq Khan, in late 2024, early 2025. Their remit was to spend a year researching and reporting and issuing recommendations on the current state of London’s nightlife. Prior to the end of 2024, London had had a night czar. That role was filled by a broadcaster and club promoter called Amy Lamé. Amy was appointed in 2016 with a remit to coordinate and bring together all of the different parts of local government that have an interest in nightlife, to connect them to the nightlife sector and essentially sharpen and improve policymaking around nighttime London. She was in that role for eight years. I think it’s fair to say that, while she did lots of really good stuff, primarily behind the scenes, by the end of that eight-year period there was a sense that the approach being taken to policymaking was not fully reflective of or aligned with the sort of grassroots, frontline needs of the nightlife scene in London.
The taskforce acted as a bit of a reset in terms of policymaking. It’s made up of 11 members. They’re drawn from all angles of London’s nightlife. You have representatives from the Music Venue Trust, from the Night Time Industries Association, from UKHospitality. You have big club operators like Broadwick Live represented, you also have grassroots venues like Corsica Studios and Colour Factory with a voice on the taskforce. They spent all of 2025 interviewing people, running focus groups, commissioning research and meeting to discuss the data that they were generating and they put together a draft report. The production of the report and the evidence was managed by a Berlin-based cultural research agency called VibeLab, who have done similar work in other cities around the world previously. VibeLab hired me in the summer of last year to come in and basically pull together all of the research and data, all of the draft recommendations, the raw form of everything that had been produced and pull it into something that looked like a report. I was part of a team of copywriters working on it, so I spent most of the second half of last year working on that project with them.
The output is the report that was published earlier this week and there are 23 recommendations in it. The headline one is probably the creation of a permanent project London Nightlife Commission, so that’s a separate entity to the taskforce, although it is a collective body in a similar way to the taskforce. The taskforce had a strictly time-limited remit, so it was always going to report and then come to an end. The Commission is mandated to essentially continue working on the same themes to basically implement the recommendations and continue advising the GLA and local councils, the Metropolitan Police and Transport for London on nighttime policymaking. They will, to a certain extent, replace the functions and responsibilities that were previously held by one person in the form of the night czar, but it will be a more collective, collaborative process. The other key difference between the commission and the night czar is that they will be independent of City Hall. The night czar was appointed by the mayor’s office, sat beneath the mayor and was within the GLA power structure, which has both positives and negatives. It was felt, certainly by the end of Amy Lamé’s term as night czar, that this limited her ability to criticise GLA policymaking or to identify areas that weren’t working as well as they should have been. The commission will be independent, so it will be freer to speak truth to power. It will have a formal role advising the GLA, sitting on various boards and subcommittees that make those decisions.
CR: Which of these recommendations do you think has the most potential to make a big impact? What’s the strongest stuff in here?
EG: The one piece of evidence that really jumped out at me when I first got handed the draft report was around crime. The taskforce cross-referenced the location of late-night venues with late-night footfall. They got credit card usage data so they could map out where people were in the city late at night and then cross-referenced both of those with late-night crime statistics to identify what correlation, if any, there was between late-night crime and late-night venues. Are clubs a magnet for crime and disorder?
What they found was that there’s no correlation, that actually late night crime is correlated with footfall of any kind. It doesn’t matter if you are going to a club or you are on a high street or you’re coming back from football, what matters is footfall – that’s the thing that is associated with higher levels of late-night crime. Clubs can, in fact, be safer than other parts of the city late at night.
What was interesting about that lack of correlation was that it upends decades, if not centuries, of stereotypes about what late-night venues are and how they operate. Traditionally, they’ve been seen as places that are hives for antisocial behaviour, the ‘dens of iniquity’. The data shows that that’s not the case at all. Those assumptions have been the basis on which these spaces have been policed and regulated for a very long time. If the data underpinning that is not accurate, then inevitably that creates an argument for processes to change.
The other one that really stood out to me was about the role of nightlife in making people feel at home in London, to decide to move to London and to stay in London. A lot of people that responded to the survey that the taskforce ran said that nightlife makes them feel more connected to the community around them, and makes them feel part of the city in a way that they might otherwise not. There was a particular statistic around high-earning tech and IT workers, in terms of nightlife being a pull factor and a retention factor. That was really interesting, because that’s a lot of London’s tax base right there. If you have the choice between living and working in San Francisco, Cologne or London, it’s understandable that London’s clubbing scene might be one of the things that makes you live here rather than somewhere else in the world. That strengthens the economic argument in support of the nightlife sector, in areas of the conversation where the economic angle is the most important thing.
CR: You mentioned the discovery about crime and late-night venues not having a correlation, but what does that means in terms of shifting policy, or shifting expectations for policing? It feels like there’s quite a large gulf between having that realisation and establishing different policing directives. Do you have any sense of how that might trickle down?
EG: I’m obviously not an expert in the policy delivery side of things, so I wouldn’t want anyone to take my word as gospel, but one of the interesting things that I think will potentially come out of that particular piece of data is around licensing. There is a pilot phase that’s been announced, I don’t think full details of it have been published yet, but at some point in the first half of this year there’ll be legislation enabling the mayor to call in licensing applications in the same way that he’s currently able to call in planning applications. So if there is a planning proposal that is of importance to London as a city, the mayor can call it in and can essentially overrule a local council’s decision.
When this pilot scheme starts up, he will be able to do the same thing with licensing applications for venues. So for example, when Fabric was closed in 2016 that was a hugely important space. The evidence against it was, by my reading, incredibly flimsy. At the time, Sadiq Khan was absolutely adamant that Fabric needed to reopen. In the future, were something like that to happen, the mayor would technically have the ability to call in that licensing decision and ensure that clubs reopened quickly. To connect it to that piece about crime, there is ready evidence now available to venues to bring to licensing hearings and to licensing subcommittees that will back up their own efforts to keep clubs safe, to ensure that crime is dealt with.
I think the evidence in the report will trickle into a succession of small decisions that affect individual venues. It’s not a case where you wave this report around and suddenly the whole landscape changes – it will be a case of the data within and the recommendations within it percolating through the sector over the next couple of years.
CR: I wonder if the same applies to the recommendation about rethinking approaches to nighttime sound, which mentions a ‘noise mediation pilot’ that could supplement subjective complaints with real-time data.
TL: I have a good friend who used to run a venue in Deptford who had a hellish few years dealing with this. With noise complaints, you basically only need one. If there’s one neighbour that keeps complaining, that can affect your venue, regardless of whether you have 30 neighbours in proximity to the building that don’t complain.
EG: One of the recommendations in the report is a minimum number of noise complaints from different addresses that would be required before an environmental health investigation is triggered. There’s two ways of approaching issues like noise. One is making sure that the existing systems are fit for purpose and accurately and appropriately reflect the competing needs. Nobody wants to be subjected to unreasonable noise in their homes for an extended period of time, but the sticking point is what’s reasonable and unreasonable. Ensuring that there is a fair balance in the systems that currently exist between cultural activity and London’s relatively dense housing stock is one way of addressing this.
The other thing that I think is really important is proactive measures. Quite a lot of what the report talks about is not just reforming systems that currently exist, but ensuring that new systems are put in place so that situations like flats being built next door to Corsica Studios don’t occur, so that the problem is intercepted earlier on in the process. One of the things that came up a lot in the focus group that I was part of was the detachment of planning from licensing. So for example, if you wanted to build a club, you might get a license to operate that club, but then get refused planning permission to build the building, or to change the use of the building from an office to a club. Or you might get permission to have a club in a building, but then not get the license to operate it. Those kinds of discontinuities, where it’s not just about reforming the system as it is but rethinking the whole approach to it… that calling-in power for the mayor probably falls into the latter of those two camps, as well as providing more opportunities for people to talk about this stuff earlier in the process.
TL: I do wonder about the potential conflicts of interest here. I’m not sure the big institutions – Fabric, Broadwick Live – work towards the same goals as someone who runs a party in a smaller venue, or a party that is primarily for a marginalised audience and probably only ever breaks even or makes a small profit. That’s without even getting into big venues enforcing exclusivity clauses and pushing up DJ fees – practices that negative affect smaller venues. Do you share those same concerns?
EG: I wasn’t in the taskforce meetings themselves. I got the copy later, so I can’t really speak to the specific interactions between people. What I do think is really important about the report is that, normally when a report like this is put together, you will have people from different perspectives and they will each bring their pet recommendation and there’ll be a whole round of horse trading. It was made very clear from the beginning that that’s not how this process would work, that every single one of the 23 recommendations needed to be agreed fully by all 11 taskforce members. This report is a floor, rather than a ceiling.
There are of course going to be other issues that are really important to address, like exclusivity clauses, but I don’t think that this taskforce or this report was ever really intended to grapple with those questions. It’s designed as things that everyone within the sector can agree on, a basic middle ground, which, again, is not intended to be an instant solution to every single problem facing the industry. It’s designed to be a really solid basis for agreement and coalition building moving forward. There are areas where the interests of large corporate operators are bound to come into conflict with the interests of tiny grassroots spaces. There are also, and I think the report shows this pretty clearly, a huge number of areas where their interests are aligned. I don’t think that it is contradictory or hypocritical to work together on those areas whilst also continuing wider debates that are more specific, more specialised, that focus on particular areas within that ecosystem.
TL: Obviously this is a London-specific taskforce we’re talking about, but would you say these recommendations could apply across the country?
EG: I would like to think so. Every city has its own specificities, its own particular kind of cultural needs. So I don’t think that you could just copy and paste this onto another city. Cities like Bristol have really benefited from having a nighttime economy advisor in the same mould as the night czar. It would be really interesting to see what this more collective model might mean in other cities in the UK. I think it would be a case of taking the principle of it and then going through a similar process, rather than necessarily the report itself being immediately transferable.
One of the things that’s specific to London is that you’re dealing with 33 individual local authorities. Most other cities in the UK will deal with two, three at the most. A lot of the stuff in the report around engaging with local boroughs and ensuring consistency across different local authorities will not be as relevant. Some of the stuff around London being a global capital won’t really be applicable to other cities. I think the direction of travel of the conversation overall, over the last decade, has been a positive one in both London and the rest of the UK. London appointed the UK’s first night czar, other cities have followed suit. London developed that process to a point where there’s an appetite for a broader and more inclusive way of doing things. It stands to reason that other cities may well reach that point in their thinking and process as well.
CR: There’s something very promising about the night czar evolving into a taskforce that’s a collective. It makes me think of what our guest Anjali Prashar-Savoie was saying at our live event at the ICA. In her new book she offers some historical examples of what might be called a ‘club commons’ – for example, collectively organising and maintaining the club and its various resources. How do you think Anjali’s vision of a club commons slots into what the taskforce is doing? The counter to that is my fear that top-down decision-making gets the job done. There’s a worry that by creating a new, quango-like body, that you’re gumming up the gears.
EG: It’s the age-old dilemma for anyone with radical politics. How much time and energy do you invest in trying to reform the system as it is? How much time and energy do you invest in trying to build something completely new that’s separate from it? The taskforce is very much a case of working with and trying to improve existing power structures and existing decision making, rather than building something that is entirely divorced from ongoing political debates.
In terms of how the commission will function, there are three things I see as make or break. The first is going to be around budget. There’s lots of really great stuff in the report that everyone involved in it has signed up to and endorsed. Actually making it happen will depend to a certain extent on there being money for it. A really good example of this is around transport. When the taskforce put their survey out to everyone, the single most common response back from people about the thing they would change about London’s nightlife, if they could, was transport. TfL has been involved in the production of the report. They’ve been consulted, they’ve signed off on the recommendations, they are fully in favour of all the things that the taskforce would like to see happen. TFL also operate on incredibly tight budgets, and there may simply not be resources available for them to put on extra buses that operate when it’s time for clubs to close, which is one of the things that gets discussed in the report. The budget is going to be a really, really important one.
The second one is, now that the commission is going to be independent, it’s really important that there is a mechanism within City Hall for their recommendations and their opinions and their perspective to have bite on the political process. All that stuff is currently being established. From what I understand, it sounds like that’s being taken really seriously and that the commission will have a sort of a fulcrum into City Hall and the GLA that will allow it to be really effective – but it is really important that it’s done right.
The third and most important thing that I think will have an effect on the first two of those is the involvement of people working in, and expert in, grassroots nightlife across London. There will be lots of opportunities, as I understand it, for people to get directly involved with the work of the commission to feed into what they’re doing. That will then be fed into the GLA and be taken seriously. There is a real opportunity here for people to get their hands on the levers of power. That doesn’t automatically mean giving up other, more radical forms of action as well. I think it’s entirely possible and appropriate for there to be work going on on much more egalitarian, ground-up models of property ownership, of business ownership, of generating and sustaining culture at the same time as people are taking the opportunity to feed those principles and that energy and those perspectives into the way that decisions are being made at a higher political level.
CR: I think the real crunch point is just a lack of money. In the report there was a question for nightlife workers about the biggest challenge in their jobs – and it was just low pay. We are in a constant cost-of-living crisis. I noticed not just business rates being a problem for clubs, but very specifically energy bills being a huge, almost silent killer in the background. I’ve read about venues saying that their bills had gone up 80%, 90% in the space of a few years. There isn’t any way that a report or a commission like this can tackle some of those problems.
EG: A report like this, a taskforce like this, even the commission, will never be able to solve every single problem that impinges on our experience of nightlife. It is too big, too intractable a problem to solve single-handedly. But what it can do is make some things that are currently additional problems, slightly more manageable problems, or hopefully make them not problems at all, or create additional benefits and positives that might not otherwise have existed. I think that very much sits alongside also trying to develop systems that are not subject to those pressures, alternative ways of living and operating that sidestep some of those issues, rather than confronting them.
TL: Britain seems fairly likely to have a far-right government in the near future via Reform, and I was wondering about the implications of that on nightlife. You’ve made the point in your writing before that it’s a tried-and-tested trick for right-wing politicians to fold the decline of British pubs and clubs into wider anxieties about the state of the country – and usually then blame that on immigration. Do you think that a Reform victory could lead to further struggles for nightlife in the UK?
EG: If Reform win in 2029 then everyone’s in trouble. There are going to be a huge number of additional challenges to face. I do think that nightlife, club culture, raving, however you want to describe it, has always operated as a little bit of a microcosm of British society – in loads of ways a microcosm of the best of British society. The more robust these spaces and this industry can be in the present, the more likely they are to be able to stand up to additional pressures in the future. If we have a Reform government it’s not just queer clubs that are going to be directly under threat, but whole aspects of queer life, of which clubs are merely one part.
There’s a principle here of rallying around the things that you love and that bring you together and working out how to make them effective and robust and resilient that can act as a practice for wider forms of solidarity, of mutual resource and resilience building. I see clubs as a social, cultural and community asset in the same way that schools and hospitals are. They are things that we should be involved in, be invested in, be supportive of, be engaged with. Whether that is through something like this report and engaging in the political process around them, or whether it is around joining under a cooperative model, like Sister Midnight, where you can become a member and own a share of the club. Maybe it’s something as simple as helping out, or checking in on your local DJ!
Nightlife has always been a community endeavour. Strengthening it cannot help but strengthen communities in ways that I think are increasingly necessary, given the direction that the country and the world is taking. If in three or four years’ time we find ourselves with Nigel Farage as prime minister, it’s going to be even more important that we have clubs that we can go to, that we can feel safe in, that we can escape from things in for a couple of hours and that can help build wider forms of solidarity that we can then feed back into opposition to whatever horrible things are coming down the track.
CR: What you were saying about nightlife itself being the beginnings of community and of action – queer nightlife is the model for how you meet your people, identify the issues that are most pertinent to you, or most dangerous for you, and then organise to demand change. So it’s not wishy-washy to say that clubbing can be a site of some of that organising, but it also isn’t a given.
I went to the Green Party Party at Heaven, and I left feeling like I hadn’t really been given a task, I wasn’t quite sure what the next thing to do should be. But on the other hand, it did feel like the right meeting point, being in a club.
EG: I entirely agree with you. Dance music and clubbing is not inherently liberatory, but it models ways of interacting with each other that can support more radical ways of being with each other. It can act as a template for other forms of activism, or a meeting point, a catalyst, an incentive. If you get the politics right then you get to have a big party as the result of it. All of these things are interlinked, but they’re not necessarily 100% correlated.
CR: A couple of big ones to end on. Do you think we’ll ever make Shoreditch great again?
EG: I’m south of the river and one of the things that’s really shifted for me in the last couple of years is there’s so much good stuff in South London now. Maybe this is me getting a bit older and being a bit lazier, or maybe it is some of these green shoots coming up alongside all of the other difficult stuff, but I sort of don’t need Shoreditch. It can come back if it wants to! That’ll be great for East London, if that’s what East London needs. But we’re doing alright without it, in my view.
CR: I do agree, but it’s sad for me because I’ve decided now that I live in Haggerston, so it would be good if Shoreditch was great. Maybe a more serious question though – and again, it comes back to the interplay between the taskforce’s recommendations and the mayor’s office and individual council – but Westminster is a problem. Soho has been really struggling and declining, basically since I came to London. It’s increasingly dead, it’s very touristy, there’s much less late-night entertainment and music. It seems like Westminster Council is going to be one of the trickier councils to negotiate with on this front.
EG: That distinction explains in part some of the tension between the ‘nightlife is dying’ and ‘nightlife is clinging on’ arguments. When some people talk about nightlife in London, what they mean is nightlife in Westminster, and will perhaps overlook all the exciting things that are happening slightly further out. Of course, having a strong nightlife scene in the centre of the city that everyone can access, so that people who live south of the river aren’t having to head to Tottenham three nights a week, or vice versa for people coming to Brixton or Peckham, is really important. But Westminster Council is not in charge of nightlife across London.
Westminster has been a tricky one. Hackney has been tricky at points in the past, but got a lot better. Lambeth published their nighttime strategy the same day that the London Nightlife Taskforce report came out. From my perspective, what I hope, having been part of the report, is that having a central, London-wide document, which spells out in very clear terms the evidence base for nightlife and a set of actions that can help support it, then gives the rest of us more leverage when it comes to councils that are less supportive, or individual councillors within councils to shift the Overton window in a more positive direction. That it sets a standard for everyone else to either follow or fight against.
If you get enough momentum behind it, then one of the things that I think is going to be really important over the next few years is people getting directly involved in the political process. That doesn’t necessarily mean signing up with the commission, it means being aware of campaigns and writing to local councillors. The example recently with Moth Club was really illustrative. There was serious concern there, there was a huge public response and Hackney Council were forced into making a statement that made very clear that they were going to protect the venue. That doesn’t necessarily mean that everything’s fine forever, but it shows to me that there is an understanding at a political level of the importance of these issues.
There is a huge amount of energy amongst people who care about nightlife and about culture to get their hands dirty. We need more of that and I think the more that we engage in that, both in a kind of grassroots, self-creating way, the models that Anjali has spoken about, alongside people getting stuck into the political nitty gritty. The more that we confront the issue from as many different angles as possible, the harder it becomes for one councillor in Westminster to undermine everyone else.
I don’t want to be overly optimistic about any of this. Who knows what’s gonna happen over the next few years in London, in the UK, in the world! It would be wildly naive to assume, given all the evidence to the contrary, that things are going to be good, but I do think that there is an opportunity for cautious optimism with this report. There is, as I see it, an invitation being offered to people who have previously been excluded from these sorts of conversations, who have been welcomed into the room as part of the taskforce. That report has resulted in what I think is a really substantial and really significant shift in the policy level conversation around nightlife and club culture and there’s the opportunity to do even more of that.
Whether you’re a dancer, whether you work in a venue, whether you own a venue, whether you’re a DJ or an artist, or you a booker or an agent, I feel confident saying that there will be space for those perspectives and that expertise to really have purchase on the political process. We went from one person to a team of 11 to, I’m not sure exactly how big the commission’s going to be, but the idea is for it to have a set of working groups that branch off from it, so potentially a huge number of spaces available for people to get directly involved. There’ll be consultations that people can feed into. There’s an opportunity there, which, regardless of anything else, regardless of any other work that needs to be undertaken alongside that, regardless of the overall political direction of the country, feels worth engaging positively with.
TL: Ed, you know what the last question is. Recommend us a film.
EG: I was thinking about films that the average Taganista would really enjoy and probably hasn’t seen. I’m going to recommend a documentary from 2019 called Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. It’s about a woman called Marion Stokes, who was a militant communist living in, I believe, Philadelphia, and her form of political praxis was to record, on a succession of VHS recorders dotted around her multiple houses, 24-hour US news networks for 30 years. She started recording during the Iranian hostage crisis in the late seventies and kept on recording until she died, during news reports of the Sandy Hook massacre.
She was a fabulously wealthy woman – she basically had a driver and a nurse whose job descriptions included changing over these VHS tapes every seven hours. She amassed something like 77,000 seven-hour videos. She had a spare flat for storing the video tapes. It’s absolutely insane. Her life story is remarkable. She comes across in the film as a terrifyingly intelligent woman, but also her relationship with her family was very, very difficult. She was really obsessively into Star Trek, she was spied on by the FBI, she had a political discussion show on a local access news channel. So it’s all of her life and it’s told through interviews with people who knew her, but also through the footage she amassed, which is this incredible archive of American culture through the second half of the 20th century. There is one sequence in it, which I won’t spoil, but involves replaying a pivotal moment in American history simply by lining up four different news channels as they’re playing and then each switching to events, one after another. It’s inspiring and terrifying in equal measure. There’s footage of [Trump’s campaign manager] Kellyanne Conway from the ‘80s when she’s on cable news. All of these figures that pop up through history. It’s brilliant, it’s one of my favourite documentaries and one of my favourite films.
CR: It’s such a bizarre thing for a militant communist to be fiddling around with. The revolution will not be televised, I thought that was the point! It’s not going to be on television, you’ve got to go and do it.
EG: Her reasoning was that one of the ways that capitalism reasserts itself is through the media and through media framing of events. So she was recording it as evidence of America lying to itself. This is slightly spoiling the ending, but the film ends with her entire collection being donated to the Internet Archive. I think they got hold of it probably 12 or 13 years ago, so they’re still in the process of digitising it. So eventually perhaps that will be made available. Perhaps it will simply sit on a server somewhere for eternity.
