To some people, the nightclub smoking area offers a moment of relief from the ear-rattling speakers and clouds of dry ice inside. For others, it’s an opportunity to sit down and chew the fat with a friend, or to forge a connection with a new one. Rarely is it just about having a cigarette. Whatever its function, a trip to the smoking area has become a ritual part of the night for many clubbers, regardless of whether they smoke or not. It’s an experience that might be lost altogether if the government pursues a ban on smoking outside clubs, bars and pubs.
On Friday night at a small DIY club in Sheffield, the smoking area is packed despite the cold temperature. People are exchanging names as they share Rizlas and filters and accidentally pocket one another’s lighters. In one corner, there’s a group of friends running through the updates in each other’s lives. Nearby, a couple who have just met are making out. It’s a familiar scene to anyone who has been in a club since 2007, when the indoor smoking ban moved nicotine-abetted socialising from the dancefloor to these now beloved outdoor zones.
“To me, the smoking area can be the most intimate part of the club,” says Dani, 27. “It’s hard to have really good conversations inside because you can’t always make out what someone is saying. The chats outside can have more depth.” Even as a non-smoker, she reckons she spends a significant part of her nights out here on the terrace, and she carries a lighter on a chain attached to her belt because she recognises its currency in social settings: a guaranteed icebreaker. She’s met most of her friends here. “You’re all at the same club night, you probably like the same kind of music, so in a lot of ways there’s already this connection, at least on some level. By Friday night, you might be letting go of the week and feeling a bit more open; there’s a cheekiness to it. It’s a great environment for bonding with people.”
Take Joseph and Sophie, both 29. When I meet them in the smoking area of Corsica Studios, a club in Elephant and Castle, two days later, they reel off all the friendships they owe to these accidental hives of activity. “We met the best man at our wedding in a smoking area,” Joseph gushes. “We were going outside and I was rolling a cigarette. He was like: ‘Can I have half of that?’ I said yeah and we’ve been best friends ever since!”
Other interactions are more ephemeral but no less memorable: a deep and meaningful chat with someone you’ve just met before losing them as soon as you re-enter the club; impassioned gossip with a person whose name you never caught. Alex, 25, tells me about a friend they made one night outside the now-closed Antwerp Mansion in Manchester, aged 16. The pair got talking but failed to stay in touch. However, over the next few years, they would continue to bump into each other outside nightclubs across the country.
“She just became this person who I would see sporadically in smoking areas!” Alex laughs. Despite not remembering each other’s names, these interactions began to feel special, marking milestones in their life: their first dabbles with hedonism, freshers’ week, the opening of clubs after the pandemic. “I think all the best socialising happens in smoking areas. My story is proof of how these spaces work covertly to randomly unite people by offering a quiet spot for a shared activity.”
It’s these transient moments that Gaby, 28, treasures most. “It’s not just about falling in love or finding someone that’ll still be your best friend 20 years later; smoking areas are just a really amazing space for those times when you [meet someone, and] both know that you might never speak again after these 10 minutes. This is a place where it’s completely fine to just talk to a new person and there’s no pressure: we’re not doing this because we’re on a Hinge date, we’re not doing this because we’re in a job interview, I’m just meeting you because you had a lighter and I didn’t. It doesn’t have to be any more than that and it might never mean anything, but it’s a little snapshot of people’s lives.”
After two years of living in Japan, where smoking often still takes place on the dancefloor, Gaby returned to the UK in June. “When I first got back, I went to a club night with the sole intention of just sitting on a bench in the smoking area and meeting people,” she says. “And that’s literally all I did for four hours, because that’s what you do: you chat to strangers in a way that you don’t in other public settings, and that’s really special.” In what she describes as an “increasingly isolationist society”, she worries about the impact that losing smoking areas could have on human interactions: “I think we’d be losing a genuinely valuable, non-digitally-mediated space to meet strangers and those are actually really, really rare.”
Naturally, then, club smoking areas are also ripe for building romantic connections. Sometimes, all you need is a bit of dutch courage and a sociable setting to approach someone hot for a lighter knowing full well you have one stuffed in your trouser pocket. As one friend told me only half-jokingly last week – over a cigarette in a pub garden – Keir Starmer’s proposed ban could “single-handedly kill hook-up culture”.
Having an informal space to chat freely holds a lot of value for dating, says Tom, 26, “especially in our culture of boundaries and emotional reservation”. When he quit cigarettes almost two years ago, he made a vow to himself not to stop frequenting the smoking area: it’s where he tends to find the most interesting people. It’s also where he’s been able to hit it off with people he’s exchanged knowing glances with earlier in the night. “On an app or in a bar, you have to put in more effort, which people struggle with or find artificial. I know so many people who have nurtured a fling within the confines of the smoking area.”
Occasionally, these encounters can lead to lasting relationships. In 2017, Jay, 31, met his boyfriend Jonny outside a queer party in Manchester. They had chatted briefly on the apps but had not got round to organising a date. “Me and some pals had gone out for a breather and I ended up seeing Jonny,” he tells me on his way to a day party in Peckham. “I went over and we just started chatting for ages, missing a good chunk of the music inside.” After spending the rest of the night together, they arranged to meet up the following day. “We’re still together, seven and a half years later. We actually just bought a house the other day.”
Luke, 41, remembers the shift that the 2007 indoor smoking ban caused in UK nightclubs and how he bemoaned the introduction of a separated outdoor space. “Before smoking areas, you were present in a room full of people. People rarely peeled off for a fag alone or in splinter groups; chats were shouty but with movement and self-expression. You might retreat back to the bar or bogs with a newfound party friend to see if the patter matches the vibe, but otherwise the room was sealed. It allowed longer periods of group dance experience.”
But now, almost two decades later, he’s come around to smoking areas, and would be sad to see them go. “Punctuation is important, even if it’s in the form of fag-breathed huddles of excited people,” he says. “You end up meeting a wider cross section of the party because you can smoke and chat without just necking each other inside.” He believes the atmosphere inside the club has also improved. “Having more defined intervals for chilling out can ultimately lead to people dancing harder than they would staying put all night,” he continues. “On balance it’s much better now.”
It’s a sentiment Jay agrees with. “There’s all this rhetoric about communities being made on a dancefloor,” he says. “But, really, it happens in the smoking area.”
