When Simeon Aldred first visited Tate & Lyle’s east London base to scope out whether the echoing factory halls could become London’s newest cultural powerhouse, the deal didn’t need much sweetening. As strategy director of events behemoth Broadwick Live, Aldred has history with this kind of thing — Londoners will know him best as the man who helped transform an abandoned newspaper printing press in Canada Water into Printworks, one of the world’s best clubs — and so this humongous 55,000sq ft site was, on paper, very much his kind of thing. But stuck to his shoes was also a pretty literal metaphor that this might be a tasty proposition: the floor was covered in golden syrup.
This venture will be a new club called The Beams, due to open later this year, and it’s set to grow into the latest example of what has become Broadwick’s speciality: taking underused, under-loved spaces and giving them a cultural rebirth. This latest site, sat on the north bank of the Thames in Silvertown, is less than half a mile away from another new opening from the group, Dockyards, whose massive, repurposed open-air space will burst into life with a dance music weekender on September 10-11. Aldred and his partners, then, are determined that it’s not just old ravers who never die, but old buildings too.
