Harper-Thames on Which Venues Are Still Running, Which Closed This Year, and What the Night Time Industries Association Is Trying to Do About It
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Harper-Thames | Shore Roar Shoreditch Street Journalism
The Waiting Room in Stoke Newington is still open. The Moth Club in Hackney is still open. Fabric is still open. Rich Mix is still open. These are the venues that I am starting this piece by naming because naming them is a form of support that is available to me as a journalist that costs nothing and that contributes marginally to the visibility that helps venues survive. Visibility matters. The Night Time Industries Association’s research consistently shows that venue discovery remains largely word-of-mouth and local journalism, which means that what I write about and what gets written about affects which venues people attend, which affects which venues can sustain their programme, which affects which venues survive the year.
The venues that closed in the past twelve months in East London and near East London include several that I wrote about and that closed anyway, which is the particular helplessness of local journalism applied to venue survival: you can document, you cannot fund, and documentation without funding is a record of loss rather than a prevention of it. I have records. The venues are closed. The records are not compensation for the absence.
Why Some Survive and Others Don’t
The survival pattern among East London music venues has several consistent elements. Venues that own their buildings or have long leases at fixed rents have more financial stability than those on short leases at market rents — the building ownership is the single most protective factor against the closure sequence that begins with rent review and proceeds through financial stress to termination. Venues with diverse income streams — ticket sales, bar revenue, private hire, late-night extension nights — are more resilient than those dependent on a single revenue type. Venues with strong community relationships that produce a sense of ownership among regular audiences survive closure threats through community campaigns that mobilise political attention and occasionally financial support.
The Night Time Industries Association, which advocates for the night-time economy at the national policy level, has been pushing for changes to the planning system that would make it easier for venues to demonstrate economic and cultural value in planning decisions, and that would extend the Agent of Change principle’s application so that residential developers who build near existing venues cannot subsequently use noise complaints to close those venues. The Night Time Industries Association’s policy work is the most detailed public analysis of venue economics and planning policy available.
The Waiting Room has a show tonight. The Moth Club has shows every week. Fabric is open on Fridays and Saturdays. Rich Mix programmes film, music, and theatre from a building that the Hackney community fought to preserve in its current form. These four facts are worth knowing. My venue coverage at The London Prat has the full picture, updated as closures and openings occur.
For music scenes that survive despite everything, see The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
