London has many marquee names but, it feels fair to say, Meridian Water is not among them. And were you to pick a venue for the night of your life, an empty IKEA warehouse might not be the one. But perhaps both are soon set to change as Broadwick Live — the team behind Field Day festival, The Beams and the now-silenced Printworks — open their biggest-ever venue in September. Welcome to Drumsheds.
Technically, this is the second Drumsheds, though the first, which opened in the summer of 2019 and closed in January 2022, never really had a chance to get going in earnest; though granted, there were other things for the world to be worrying about. And while the name is the same, everything else is new. “The old Drumsheds is ironically in the middle of being torn down,” says Simeon Aldred, Broadwick Live’s founder. “And this is an evolution of the brand, of everything. But we kept the name because this feels like its next iteration; that had a sense of experimentation and of being fluid, and this does too.”
