Clubs

January won’t just be transfer time for football players looking for new clubs to play at – there’ll also be promoters aplenty looking for new clubs after the recent closure of three King’s Cross venues. Canvas, The Cross and The Key are no more after their series of finale sessions culminated on January 1 and now the familiar cry, ‘London desperately needs a new venue’, rings out once again. It’s a perennial problem because, quite simply, people get tired of the same party locations. Temporary Event Notice (TEN) licences that enable promoters to hold ‘legal warehouse parties’ have made a dramatic impact on the range of spaces being used for parties and raves, but there’s no substitute for purpose-designed clubs.

Even so, there has been a host of new nightlife launches in recent months. The beautiful art deco club and boutique hotel Dex is getting established in Brixton and will be launched as a members’ club in February (it could do for SW9 what Shoreditch House does for you-know-where by the summer). The Island has already attracted many monthly house nights that used to be at The Cross (Type, Kidology and Fierce Angel spring to mind), drawn to its beautifully restyled rooms designed by Barcelona-based architect Francisco Aniorte, the friendly staff and Funktion One sound system to the alley at the back of Heaven in Charing Cross. The seriously swanky, three-floor Revolution Leadenhall is drawing the Sintillate crowd to get smart on Saturdays in the heart of the City (just opposite the Lloyd’s Building, in fact) and the revamped Amersham Arms brings rock and rave, live gigs and clubby knees-ups to New Cross.

The good news is that this wave of new or inventively revamped venues is set to roll across London right through the year. It’ll come as no surprise that most of the new activity will continue to be in the City and on the east side of town. Faith DJ and promoter Stuart Patterson is set to relaunch East Village later in February on the site of the soon-to-close Medicine Shoreditch on Great Eastern Street, revamping the venue into a club (with a superb EV sound system) that’ll open seven days a week. Rob Hives, co-promoter of Mulletover, has fulfilled a long-standing ambition to run his own venue by taking over The Pleasure Unit on Bethnal Green Road. He plans to expand the bijou club-bar into a two-floor (220 capacity) venue and it will close in February for a month-long makeover to relaunch in mid-March.

Cable Street in Limehouse, over in the proper East End, has been a hotbed (often literally) of saucy polysexual partying and all-hours raves for a few years now, with at least five venues each drawing very diverse crowds. One of them is Unit 7, which has been running on TEN licences for the last couple of years. Steve Burkes, who runs it with Cristiano Serioli and Charlie King, is now hoping to get their full licence ‘by the end of this month’, as they’ve been jumping though all the necessary hoops to get the venue up to scratch. They’re ready for it, having hosted parties by the likes of Mulletover, Slaang, Nude and Circo Loco plus their amazing New Year’s Eve night, Seductive Alchemy, when their 700-capacity crowd all dressed up and, well, went wild. ‘The party vibe is the most important thing,’ states Burkes, so they won’t just be opening the doors to standard club nights. ‘Whatever goes off down at Unit 7 always has a hint of originality.’

There are a number of other venues on the east side that are also aiming to make the transition from warehouse party spaces to fully licensed clubs this year, while a significant 1,000-capacity venue is set to reopen in April after being closed for many years, but as leases and licences are pending, we’re sworn to secrecy about its EC1 location.

Cymon Eckel (whose CV encompasses Boy’s Own parties, the Vapour Festival and running venues from Riki Tik’s in Soho to the Coronet) is looking forward to a May launch for his new, two-floor venue in Cowper Street, behind Old Street station. ‘It’s two floors of classic loft space that I want to be a multi-dimensional space for special events rather than a pure club venue, so it will incorporate a gallery, bar and grill, and performance and party spaces over 7,000 square feet.’

By far the largest plans for new-build venues in 2008 comes from the Fabric team, who will be opening an architecturally bold, purpose-built, multimillion-pound space in September next to The O2 inside the Dome. Fabric’s founder and director Keith Reilly and managing director Cameron Leslie are the principal partners but they emphasise that this venue will not just be ‘Fabric 2’, a supersized nightclub. ‘It’s a different type of venue entirely,’ says Leslie, ‘with far greater emphasis on performance and live elements than we have been able to deliver at Fabric. The biggest room at Fabric holds 700-800, which puts a limit on what we can do there, but the new venue will have a capacity of over 2,500. It’s a space where we will be able to do club and nightlife events but it has a much broader range of performance possibilities, from live gigs and concerts to theatre and much more.’ You read it here first.

Meanwhile, Billy Reilly (Keith’s brother, in case you’re wondering), who has been running The Cross, The Key and Canvas, has major plans for 2008, including a total transformation of Pacha in Victoria in time for an autumn reopening. ‘We’ve got the landlord’s consent to put a roof garden on there, which will be the second largest in London,’ he says, ‘so hopefully we’ll get planning permission.’ At the same time, they’ll transform the interior to make it a proper two-floor club with a much larger capacity. That won’t happen until the summer but in the meantime he aims to create a brand new Pacha Terrace on the site of Driver, at the Kings Cross end of Caledonian Road, and he’s recently acquired a six-arch site on Camden Road which ‘if I can get the licence, I could make even better than the Cross.’ That’s just the kind of ambitious talk we love to hear at this time of year.