It’s a concerningly warm Saturday afternoon in October, and a crowd of twentysomethings is traipsing towards the old Ikea in Tottenham. A year ago, their pilgrimage would have been in search of flat-pack wardrobes and cheap bedding. Now, it’s for something a little… cooler. That big blue box has been gutted and transformed into Drumsheds, an expansive industrial event space with a stacked opening line-up of electronic music. Punters are powered by more than meatballs; we are here for a rave, not a Rönnskär shelving unit. There’s intrigue, too, in seeing how the commercial space has been transformed. Felix Martin of the band Hot Chip may be due to headline a sold-out Drumsheds show later this month, but he still has a soft spot for what the space used to be. “I don’t know about it as a club… but that Ikea was my local Ikea,” he tells me. “I have a lot of affection for it.”
The opening of Drumsheds comes with swirling feelings of anticipation – and some trepidation. After all, this is a 15,000-capacity venue opening in London at a time when we’ve repeatedly been told nightlife is dying. Like much of the arts, the night-time economy was decimated by Covid and is still experiencing the effects of a society in which people go out less and spend less money. In August, a study found that 31 per cent of UK clubs had been forced to permanently shut between June 2020 and June 2023, including 100 independent clubs in the last year alone. The cost of living crisis, gentrification, and a procession of Tory culture secretaries who wouldn’t know culture if it blasted them with a 140-decibel sound system, haven’t helped.
