When Ikea opened its gigantic flagship store in Tottenham in 2005, at one minute past midnight on a February Thursday, six people ended up in hospital. Thousands of bargain-hunters had flocked to the London outpost, lured by the promise of leather sofas for just £45, resulting in a frenzied stampede, and the store having to close its doors after only 40 minutes. As one shopper put it: “Madness descended.”
Eighteen years later the vast furniture warehouse has been reborn as Drumsheds, one of the world’s largest nightclubs: a 15,000-capacity venue set to host the biggest names in dance music. And judging by its opening on Saturday, the clubbers are a decidedly less rowdy bunch than the frantic sofa-seekers.
“We’re about safety, safety, safety,” says Simeon Aldred, co-founder of venue operator Broadwick Live. He is standing in what was once Ikea’s undercroft car park, now the space where punters are channelled through serried ranks of bag checks, sniffer dogs and body search lanes, like herds of (sparkly) cattle. “Yes, it might take 40 minutes to get through the search, but once you’re in you feel safer.”
Over the last few years, Aldred and his team have professionalised the warehouse rave experience, taking over mighty post-industrial venues and filling them with top-notch sound systems, cutting edge digital screens and dynamic lighting rigs that rise and plunge above throbbing crowds. Their Printworks venue turned a hulking former newspaper press in Rotherhithe into a cathedral of electronic music, while their original Drumsheds took over a majestic gasworks near the Ikea site in 2019 – before it was swiftly shuttered by Covid. But can a big-box retail store conjure the same gritty magic as those cavernous industrial halls? Or will the ghosts of Billy bookcases and their missing screws forever haunt the dancefloor?
For the opening, the place was brought to bedazzled life by La Discothèque, featuring legendary disco divas Evelyn “Champagne” King and Jocelyn Brown, accompanied by pink-winged, stilt-walking dancers, while the likes of Orbital, Bicep and Skepta are lined up to play in coming weeks – with some nights already sold out. And in just 10 weeks, Aldred’s team have done an impressive job of utterly transforming the building – while retaining just enough details of the old store to provide the perverse frisson of clubbing in an Ikea. Once shuffled through the security lanes, where car park markings still cover the tarmac, you come to the lobby where a rugged scaffolding staircase spills down next to the old escalator, beckoning you up to a bar that occupies the former cafe – £4 plates of Swedish meatballs swapped for £13 glasses of tropical rumbull.
Next door, the original shop floor is unrecognisable, with not a Viktigt or Örfjäll in sight. The never-ending loop of neat room sets, where Klippan sofas and Pax wardrobes provided backdrops to screaming toddlers and bickering couples, has been swept away, leaving an eerie, low-roofed hall the size of a football pitch. All that remains is Ikea’s suspended white ceiling grid, which extends into the hazy distance, giving the space the look of something from the 1980s sci-fi film Tron. Now dubbed “The Gallery”, it was off-limits for the opening – seemingly too big to know what to do with.
On the level below, where shoppers used to roam for crockery and bedsheets in Ikea’s Marketplace, the three main venues spill off a central bar zone. The loading bay has been reborn as “Z”, the smallest room in the venue with a capacity of 1,000, boasting a cage made from the steel bars used to reinforce concrete to shield its DJ booth, where latex-clad performers writhed on Saturday. “Y” is a longer, shoe-boxey space for 5,000, while the star of the show is “X”, the former warehouse where many hours were lost roaming the tall aisles stacked with cardboard boxes in search of corresponding furniture parts. With a 15,000 capacity alone – the total legal capacity for the whole venue – it is one of the biggest such spaces in the world, stretching almost 100 metres in each direction, with massive exposed steel trusses criss-crossing overhead from which hefty ranks of speakers and lighting rigs dangle.
In event mode, the real architecture is made of light, with beams, spots and screens slicing through the haze of artificial fog. Conceived by digital media collective United Visual Artists, the production design is a marvel. A transparent 46-metre-long LED screen runs behind the stage, allowing videos to alternate with rear projections, while linear ranks of lights hang from the ceiling, able to rise, lower and tilt to change the character of the space from a pitched, nave-like hall to a low, intimate feel in the pulse of a beat.
To break up the hangar-like volume – which, like the shopfloor, is possibly too big to ever feel full – two scaffolding decks form raised areas either side of the dancefloor, providing an elevated vantage point from which to look down on the heaving bodies. These structures are wrapped with raw chainlink fencing, adding further industrial kink, while the bars are backed with steel construction hoardings, found on site and sprayed matte black.
“It’s all about reuse and recycling,” says Aldred, “and thinking about things in a parasitic way. How can we work with what we’ve got?” All the staging and scaffolding is hired, while 200 of the 300 metres of bar come from Printworks, as does some of the mesh fencing, which turns out to be pieces of leftover set from a Batman movie shot there. “It’s all pretty basic: an amazing DJ, amazing screen and a great sound system. That’s enough. We don’t need trickery.”
There’s an economic logic to the light-touch approach: the venue only has planning permission for three to five years, before the inevitable steamroller of property development arrives. The Ikea site lies in the heart of Meridian Water, Enfield council’s £6bn regeneration project, and is currently up for sale as Pymmes Waterside – “offering unrivalled scale, connectivity and placemaking potential”, with outline permission for 3,000 homes. Could this piece of generic placemaking be one day spiced up with a superclub? “We believe in housing and we know we are a meanwhile project,” says Aldred. “But maybe there is a version of the future where there’s an 8,000-capacity venue here too.”
It may sound like wishful thinking. London has lost over half of its nightclubs in the last decade, and a report by the Night Time Industries Association last year found that, across the country, 14 clubs were closing every month. Mark Davyd of the Music Venue Trust paints a bleak picture. “A lot of venues managed to get through the pandemic, with loans and rent freezes,” he says. “But now landlords and creditors are asking for their money back, adding to the pressure from the cost of living crisis, changes in audience behaviour, massive energy bills and increasing noise complaints from residents.” All too often, new residents, lured by the cultural attractions that have made a place desirable, end up campaigning to have those very places shut down. But might the tide be turning?
The Ministry of Sound marked a watershed in 2014, when the developer of a tower of luxury flats across the street from the south London nightclub was forced to include acoustic glazing, sealed windows and internal winter gardens. Residents also had to sign a deed of easement, preventing future noise complaints. “We showed that clubbing and housing aren’t mutually exclusive,” says Ministry of Sound’s executive chairman, Lohan Presencer. “It set a fantastic precedent that is now being taken up by local authorities across the country, showing that housing can be built sympathetically next to music venues.”
Enshrined as the “agent of change” principle in the 2018 national planning policy framework, the onus is now on the new arrival, whether housing or nightclub, to put noise mitigating measures in place – albeit it remains guidance, and there are few checks in place to make sure the developments actually comply.
The policy has spawned some unusual hybrid developments, including a project recently granted permission in Wapping that combines 114 flats with a self-storage facility and a 24-hour nightclub to be home to a sex-positive fetish night.
“When I heard about our landlord’s redevelopment plans, I had two choices,” says club-boss Yuval Hen. “Either sabotage the plans, or be openminded and cooperate on something very exciting that could accommodate both.” Designed as a concrete box-within-a-box, the new club will be completely isolated from the flats, while residents will also sign a deed of easement to prevent future complaints. “I hope it will attract the kind of people who want to live above a club,” says Hen, “so it should be a nice vibrant community.”
Amy Lamé, night czar to the mayor of London since 2016, has been busy working behind the scenes, facilitating negotiations between operators, developers and local authorities, to help ease such projects through the system. “We need late-night spaces all over the city,” she says. “And we’re proving they can work happily alongside housing. It’s what makes London London. If we lose that, we lose the very essence of what this city is.”
Back in Tottenham, club-goers stagger out of Drumsheds’ big blue box, looking just as exhausted as if they’d spent the day trying to choose a sofa. “It was amazing,” says one. “I just wish they still sold the £1 hotdogs.”
