Review: Soho House
In the twilight years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, anyone, even Carpathian shepherds, their herds and Slavs, could dine beneath the chandeliers of Viennese salons if they had the means and proper decorum. If they were versed, they could waltz with a glass of Tokaji from the renowned viticultural region of Mongolia in hand, while economists downriver recited their perennial grievance against the English with the assurance of men soon to be disproven in all things. In one ear you were privy to analyses of whatever the hell the Saverne Affair was. In the other, a remnant of the decrepit navel-gazers of the Országgyűlés, a drunk explained, with confidence bolted on to his condition, that flight was an ‘American fad’ and would never take off, the bond markets would not have it and that Russia would steamroll their way to the Elbe in a three-day special military operation to smash any Prussian army (who are ‘FINISHED’) in its path.
The salons kept faith with their liturgy and the orchestra played on, even as the monarchy squared its shoulders for yet another reckoning with its eternal adversary, 500 kilometres downstream, because they would not stop throwing their faeces and the corpses of Bosniaks into the Danube, preventing the upstream migration of the Beluga Sturgeon and leaving Vienna and Budapest without any caviar. This is the sort of futility you feel entering Soho House on Greek Street.
Soho House opened its doors in 1995 as an antidote to ‘ossified’ rituals, a retreat for the ‘creatives’ rather than the calcified relics of some earlier epoch. Out went the cigars, the dinner jackets, and the gloomy, smoke-cured backrooms presided over by the gout-riddled alcoholics of the twentieth century whose enthusiasm for the company of women tended to outrun the women’s enthusiasm for theirs, and never seemed to outrun their enthusiasm for little boys. In swept seasonal artichoke, women named Allegra and people who donate to theatre troupes. And yet, whatever Soho House meant to be in 1995, thirty years on it is neither cool nor relevant. Having swollen to a quarter of a million members, it is not remotely private. Like Vienna before it, the House persists in the comfortable delusion that it still hosts the zeitgeist, long after the ‘creatives’ who didn’t quite make it packed their bags and decamped to Berlin, in pursuit of the next big thing.
I read Kara Kennedy’s review of the joint for the New Statesman, and it occurred to me that the club’s definition of ‘creative’ is a rather generous one if a contributor to a centre-left title, lately reinvented as ‘Royal Correspondent’ at The Spectator, could get in. I suppose the pitch she made to Fraser Nelson must have been deemed creative enough to allow her to cross the aisle and sit on the opposing benches.
The confirmation arrived quickly. ‘So, what’s your gig then?’ asked a reasonably attractive, unshod woman of middle age. I told her I wrote for John Merrick’s publication, The Break-Down, dedicated to left-wing thought from the London scene. ‘John Merrick? Like the Elephant Man?’ — I put on a smile. ‘Not quite. Ours is marginally better looking’. And a good deal more afflicted, I added in silence. ‘He also invented thinking’, I quipped.
I shuffled around attempting to discern precisely who would part with £3500 for the privilege of membership. You would picture a clientele of art-world sirens, Sloane Square MILFs, and guys who would take you to the Saatchi Gallery on the first date. The reality is more prosaic: at best, Soho House is populated by Kara Kennedys and those journalists who, when pressed to review the club, prefer to launch into catty tirades in a dialect I call ‘womanese’; babbling about other women they feel inferior to, delivered with forced wit and condescension while revealing nothing whatsoever about the business of the club itself.
But Soho House does have great problems, the first being its scale. With 270,000 members globally, it should probably just call itself a members’ club now, and drop the ‘private’ qualification. The most conspicuous flaw is the absence of a rigorous referral system, which effectively makes it a pay-to-play institution. It is adorned with Magic Americans and their cousins in the diaspora because it is the only club that admits them, perhaps rendering the concept of a private members’ club obsolete. Search for ‘Soho House Pool’ on TikTok, or don’t.
At some point, the management of Soho House did search this, and must have recognised the problem — and thus they began shutting younger people and newer members out of certain houses, especially in the West End, and funnelling them to Greek Street and Shoreditch instead. I tried entering ‘Little House Mayfair’, only to be turned away because the private members’ club was hosting an even more private event. After being redirected to their newest house, ‘Soho House Mews’, on Lancashire Court, the member I accompanied was told she needed to have been a member for 10 years to enter. They let us in anyway because the place was almost entirely empty and we didn’t look like Crystal Palace Academy prospects.
The membership bloat reveals the next biggest problem: there is no filter or criterion for what even constitutes a ‘creative’. Soho House on Greek Street is a perfect microcosm. ‘E-com’ guys in Moncler bin-bag jackets, quants, dozens of what could have been Cobham graduates but were ‘rappers’ and ‘producers’, made it clear what was going on. Have you ever been tailgated on the tube by this type? It’s pretty much the same thing — one signs up, then invites up to three friends with no screening for character or attitudes, and at any time the footfall per member can quadruple. Most members’ clubs will make you prepare a pitch deck just to invite someone once a month for a fee. For every failed ‘nah, it’s not a mixtape, it’s an addition to my story’ rapper the House admits, it must accept three more ‘hanger-ons’ or ‘day ones’ from their posse. There are still the expected household characters, and the gentrification of East London continues to rear its ugly head. ‘Men written by women’, spoken-word poets, and copywriters are all present, but I suppose the brochure was originally aimed at them after all.
The food is of little consequence: mostly gussied-up pub fare, not worth a detour. The service is abysmal, and a full Greek Street is no excuse. At Soho House Mews, with only ten souls present, it took twenty-five minutes for them to produce what they called an Eastern Standard, which is actually an Eastside cocktail they have appropriated for themselves. At £12.50, it is cheap for a Mayfair bar. Still, assuming the average cocktail in the area costs £15, you must consume 1,000 of them annually to justify the £2500 Every House Membership. The Mews redeems itself as just a nice place to be in, if nothing else, because the houses on the continent resemble airport lounges.
Soho House, for all its cachet, has never once turned a profit. I was short on it until they went private last year, in a move that happily helped me recover my losses from the catastrophic Nvidia short. It can also be worse. Other clubs went the opposite way, thinking that excluding men from expensive establishments would make for a viable business model, since The Garrick remained profitable despite not allowing women to be members. There was AllBright: A women-only members’ club, ostensibly dedicated to careers and networking, entered administration last year (again) and shuttered its flagship Mayfair townhouse on Maddox Street after only seven years. Its transatlantic cousin, The Wing, collapsed in 2022 amid financial troubles and, I kid you not, a ‘workplace culture scandal’. Chief, Grace Belgravia, Marguerite, one by one, all fell in the same period. There follows the usual post-mortem retrodiagnoses — “But when we conducted a survey, almost all women said they’d join an all-female members’ club”. The problem with this business model is self-evident, and I wish I could have sat down with the Woke harridans who thought excluding half the population which eats, drinks and spends more (often on the other half) could possibly pay dividends. There is little use for any career-minded woman to network in the space that excludes the very sex it is most advantageous to network with. They could have boasted healthy member numbers, and some did, but it requires women buying their own drinks, and I’m not sure any establishment can bear its patrons swirling the same glass of prosecco around for two hours and no men to fill them up.
Male heterosexuality: midwife of nightlife and good society
Nowhere is the centrality of men’s participation more vividly demonstrated than in the inexorable decline of the nightclub and nightlife as a whole. If you want to see what the war on male heterosexuality looks like on the ground, you go to a nightclub in 2026. Anyone who tells you the nightclub is dead because of energy costs or social media is a charlatan who either doesn’t understand how clubs make money or does and is too dishonest to engage with the reasons they don’t. At its core, almost all nightclubs rely on the same basic business model: women are brought in at little or no cost while men shoulder the costs via entry fees, drinks for themselves and the girls they’re chirpsing or at the top end via tables, booths and bottles. As an aside, it is telling that some fairly well-known organisers of literary events in London now engage in the same practices.
Historically, the nightclub functioned as a theatre for courtship, however crude and transactional. Two decades ago, a ‘couple tequilas for the birds’ typically sufficed, or if you were middle-aged, married and quite desperate, an emergency ‘Cuba Libre’ on demand with no guarantee of any affection. This arrangement endured until the Obama era, when the tacit social contract was unceremoniously discarded by Woke and the clubs became the first front line in an escalating campaign on what had previously passed for unremarkable heterosexual behaviour.
The opening salvo was the feminist critique that denied drunk women their agency or capacity for consent if they were drunk. For a time, this debate alone was enough to deter the more feeble-minded from clubbing altogether. Others, in search of moral equilibrium or plausible deniability, adopted the tactic of mutual inebriation by getting as drunk as possible to stave off the accusations of exploitation — ‘look officer, she had my head between her thighs in the back of the cab and wouldn’t let go- I’m also a victim here’ must have worked for someone. Anyway, suggesting women aren’t liable for choices they make because alcohol compromises their faculties and reasoning abilities means the franchise must immediately be subject to IQ testing: a 130 IQ woman after a night out still has better reasoning abilities than, say, a 90 IQ one, and if the former is stripped of her agency, so must the latter.
This is why no right-winger should concern themselves with the ‘Clean-up Crew’, the latest fixation by provincial ‘Anglo posters’ serving as a proxy for Americans projecting their rape fantasies onto Europe. A Clean-up Crew is not just hordes of predatory foreign men loitering outside clubs wanting to rape drunk women in an alleyway — this is a feature anywhere there are predatory foreign men present. The Clean-up Crew is largely the practice of moneyed-up black people (or adjacent ethnicities) often on the ‘two-man’, with nice cars parked outside the club, chatting up girls in the smoking area and, during closure, offering balloons, drugs and alcohol at the “AP” (after party), and usually there is one. This is far cheaper than buying a table, and less taxing than having to go and drop game in a club. The girls, almost always their own cohort (though it is increasingly difficult to parse out ethnicities in London these days), know exactly what the men want and go along to extract the gifts they’re bearing. This is not predatory; in fact, the guys will be partaking in the substances. If you do believe it is, you are either a slave to woke or must mandate that men become inebriated before ever speaking to a woman — which I imagine would turn out a lot worse for the women anyway.
After the first barrage on nightlife came the spiking hysteria. The idea of a roofie being slipped into vodka lemonades and blaming the lemonade for the fizz brought to life a real issue, until the narrative spiralled into frenzy over men allegedly sedating women with needles on crowded dancefloors. When slop accounts started posting this, accusing Maghrebi’s in Paris of injecting sedatives into packed crowds at La Fête de la musique, even the most ardent chuds of the National Socialist persuasion were quick to dismiss it. The credibility of spiking claims quickly unravelled thanks to women anyway when it turned out ‘yer bird’ was not spiked but had downed seven tequila shots in a row once the police reviewed the CCTV footage. If you are a predator, it seems you can safely leave the Rohypnol at home.
The ramifications of the MeToo consensus on corporate nightlife are no less pronounced. The boozy, long haul piss ups with your managers that started at 1pm and ended up in a club are long gone. Instead, you must settle for the sterile, eventified ‘Thirsty Thursdays’, where at the behest of women, you find yourself penned up in Leadenhall Market or Broadgate Circle like a broiler chicken because they want the ‘where to find finance bros’ TikTok and cocaine. A less judicious type could make a joke about pair bonding to a colleague who complained about being pumped and dumped, and find themself in a meeting being tried by some hag for ‘bullying’.
Now, women are just as likely to level accusations of sexual assault at the man they cheated on their boyfriend with after bawling their eyes out in the bathroom. Perhaps worse, some melt will accuse the man on her behalf for prying her from his hands. Then there are bouncers who use their remit, which they don’t understand the limits of, to behave like an Arkan Tiger while enforcing Woke. The bouncer, or ‘door supervisor’ in the parlance of the Security Industry Authority, is a person whose legal powers are, in practice, comically limited. The SIA licence is six days of training, four multiple-choice exams, a £184 fee, and now you have the de facto privilege of being the one to wield the state’s monopoly on violence in the private sphere. It, however, confers no special authority whatsoever beyond that of an ordinary citizen — no powers to arrest, search beyond your bags and pockets, or to seize your ID. They cannot detain you unless they are executing a citizen’s arrest, a power available to any member of the public, including the very drunk being manhandled out the door. What they can do is use ‘reasonable and necessary’ force, the same standard applied to you or me.
If you are shoved down a flight of slippery, Jagerbomb-lacquered staircases, get one-banged by Dani Williams or dragged out by the collar and deposited face-first on the pavement, often to the surprise of these ginger meatheads — the force is actually unreasonable and unnecessary. Legal action is entirely possible even if the patron was cunted, aggressive, or genuinely difficult. The law does not grant them licence to batter people simply because they are annoying. In practice, none of this is enforced. Bouncers, goaded by female complainants whose side tits they’re trying to grab when they hug them goodbye, enforce ‘Woke’ according to their own moral priors, much the same way the police officers ‘mate mate mate’ you and then kick your teeth in for wearing football jerseys numbered 97 (a retired number by law, apparently) or taking a photo in front of a burning police van.
Couple that with universal reluctance of the police themselves to pursue assault and property damage complaints against door staff, the difficulty of obtaining CCTV footage before it is wiped by staff, the social consensus that anyone ejected from a nightclub at 2am probably had it coming, and the victim themselves too drunk to follow through with charges. The result is a class of men (and it is almost always men, though the 2003 Licensing Act did introduce provisions encouraging female door staff) who have absorbed delusions of authority wildly in excess of anything the law grants them. They have appointed themselves judge, jury, and occasionally executioner of the night out, crafting job perks that include decking gangly students when their fragile masculinity is questioned, and getting touchy-feely with half-naked fresher girls — ‘I haven’t seen you in a while’ - ‘careful with this one, she’s naughty’.
There are those who reach for even lazier arguments than drink prices and vague mutterings about ‘costs’ to explain the death of the nightclub and why Gen Z do not drink. This is the preserve of SPADs with masochist complexes such that they think they have some God-given right to booze at places like The George and then complain about £8 pints. Drink prices do not constitute an argument when women spend £60 on ‘bottomless brunches’ to drink mimosas for two hours on their ‘pres’, given that orange juice drowns out the taste of alcohol in any drink, allowing bars to water down the ‘champagne’ content (which rushes to your head first). This is the kind of stunt, in principle, they pull on most Greek islands, scooping up unattended, half-finished drinks from tables and pouring them into a ‘punch bowl’—Káni éxi evró, fíle mou.
Equally misplaced is the social media argument: that Gen Z do not drink because they’re addicted to their gadgets. Too much doom-scrolling and too much gaming. ‘Someone should really just tell them to ‘go talk to her, bro’’. The arguments made by America’s housewives a decade ago to explain why Kyle punched a hole through the cardboard walls have now been repackaged by every bad-faith actor you can think of, from ‘macho’ Tateists, Miriam Cates, the fruity Al Fresco cabal who want to groom young boys into going outside to pay £8 pints at ‘The George’. It is a diagnosis shorn of any contact with reality. The people clocking 3,000 hours on Hearts of Iron 4 would have been staging historical re-enactments of Stalingrad in a field somewhere thirty years ago. They have never been an aberration. Excessive screen time contributing to youth loneliness serves as the same casus belli as pornography did for censoring social media and eroding online anonymity in this country. It’s a war on chuds, gamers, and most of all, chud gamers. Nobody ever bothers to explain the precise mechanism by which Instagram prevented a twenty-year-old from going to the pub or a club on a Friday night. I’d argue social media did the opposite by furnishing the lonely with the means of finding each other, which is considerably more than the nightclub ever managed.
The end of the nightclub
What actually ails Gen Z is Woke, and a particular strain of Wokeness I call ‘normie puritanism’: performatively abstaining from certain vices, particularly those easy to avoid if you are a loser. You have women on TikTok tallying up the number of months they’ve been celibate and the trend of ethnic minorities who aren’t Muslim suddenly deciding ‘you can’t put pork in your body, it’s dirty’ with no literature from the last 1400 years to back it up and then presuming to eat battery-farmed chicken. The rationale for Gen Z going teetotal is much more clear-cut. They have absorbed an ambient sludge of yer bird’s Instagram statistics and claims nobody has bothered to verify, without questioning anything. The teetotal Zoomer sincerely believes men beat their wives in drunken stupor every time England play. He believes alcohol causes violence, alcohol causes misogyny, alcohol is what makes men dangerous and that the pub is a vector of patriarchal harm and the right-wing politics of the gammon, who really just intimidates him. The Zoomer’s sobriety is his contribution to the resistance against the men he resents, in support of women, even if cuffed to the metaphysical cuck chair.
The same cultural vacuum that gutted the British nightclub has also trashed the music and style inside. Chart music 20 years ago sustained dance floors. By 2010, the well had run dry. British chart music had given us nothing to replace it; we will remember the 2010s for the tyrannical reign of Jess Glynne, Ed Sheeran and the massive corpus of boom-clap-hey-ho mind rape imposed on us by beige chino-wearing millennials and hairdressers who’d call into Capital FM and ask to queue Ella Henderson.
Where music went, fashion followed suit (or didn’t). The sartorial contract for men in nightclubs used to be unambiguous: you wore shirts, ideally with a collar, and shoes that were not trainers. The bouncer at the door actually did his job to enforce what ought to be a civilisational standard. This was a standard that pretty much collapsed everywhere that wasn’t a high-end club in Central London after 2008, but even they gave up on dress codes by 2019. The conventional explanations here are once again limited. ‘People got lazy and got scruffy and nightclubs had to accommodate by relaxing dress codes to increase footfall’ — this is true only for clubs in small provincial towns. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to go to a nightclub and then choosing not to because the dress code stipulates that you can’t wear trainers. Nightclubs in suburban areas and smaller towns probably had to drop dress codes because their footfall relies on guys who go to the pub dressed for the football and then choose to go clubbing. Perhaps dress codes all died when the last metrosexual threw himself off the Lehman Brothers building in 2008, but this merits an entirely separate article.
The elephant in the room is obviously immigration. You will be surprised at how little literature there is explicitly reckoning with the collapse of pubs, bars and clubs in areas now predominantly occupied by Muslims, however intuitive, I’ll address the nature of the problem. Muslims do not drink, and neither do Indians drink in sufficient quantities that could even keep a pub open. Nor are their cultures particularly favourable to ‘gender mixing’ or going out wrapped in bandages.
Clubs have an exceptionally fragile economic threshold because, unlike a pub or a restaurant, a nightclub requires high spatial density to generate its core product of a high-energy atmosphere and the collective pooling of pheromones. If a venue falls even below 15% of its target capacity because 15% of the youth in the club’s patron basin are now teetotal and spend their nights wrapping their Audis around lampposts, it causes a massive cascade effect. Once women notice less tightly packed dance floors, their intuition tells them ‘it isn’t a vibe’, and they will be the first to leave, perhaps to never come back. Word spreads, and other women will now frequent the club less. Female attendance is the core anchor for nightclub marketing, and they drive the decision-making process in mixed-sex groups regarding which venues to visit.
The men who spend £500 on a table and double that on bottles notice first, because they are spending all that for women and any perceivable drop in visual density means they’ll take their money elsewhere, which nightclubs rely on as their most profitable revenue stream, beginning the financial death spiral. Empty VIP sections result in fewer women looking to table-hop and nab drinks for free. With the hype and the women gone, there is no more incentive for the regular male patron who queues, pays for the ticket and pays for drinks for himself and the women he wants to chirpse. Eventually you’re left with an aggressive core of men and a minority of predictably problematic women that makes the problem terminal, which has been the trajectory of commuter towns in outer London and home county commuter towns for the last 20 years as more people arrive from abroad and from inner London.
Twenty years ago, the triangular stretch from Romford to Harold Wood and down to Hornchurch had perhaps the most flourishing club scene outside central London in the country, and all it took was for the white British population to recede from 90% to 70% in twenty years for it all to collapse. To blame the Elizabeth Line for gutting these places would be wrong, because National Rail already served them towards Liverpool Street. From what I can see, the primary purpose the Elizabeth Line served here was to connect South Asians in zones 2-4 to their cousins in the west.
What were their commercial third spaces, outside the confines of familial insularity, supposed to be, except for foreplay in public libraries? Fortunately, South Asians are distant enough in taste that Brits aren’t about to give up drinking and meet them halfway by ditching the bar and queueing for chicken and rice boxes from Pepe’s Whitechapel; there are enough youth subcultures here to immerse yourself in. In Germany, however, having started from zero a few times now, they have met the Turk halfway and become Bosnian in taste because cafe culture is certainly a feature: I saw Germans sitting outside fraternising with Turks over some coffee on a Sunday night, hijabis and what must have been a Polish girl by the size of the cross on her neck gossiping outside over cake. Perhaps because the Turk is still European enough in spirit and history and because they have a native cafe and patisserie culture, with tasteful Ottoman interiors and delicacies straight out of the Topkapı Palace kitchens, the German might find this amenable, which is not to be compared to the purple leather benches and syrup with a side of waffles being served by a ‘skilled visa’.
Perhaps worse are the minorities who do drink, and the elephant in the room is also the beast itself. It was when I saw Revolution, an enemy of the Pimlico Journal, organising ‘Indian nights’ on a Friday in October in a town with multiple universities that I began to grasp the scale of the issue. The cascade effect is still every bit as salient — if 20% of the queue for a student club is now Indians donning Brazil jerseys and running trainers, and not donning livers adapted for alcohol consumption, then girls will be put off for reasons you can just make up and probably be right anyway. In 2026 you will find Indian nights on Fridays at any given university town, which is either a segregation mechanism, or the kiss of death. Chinese internationals have been around for a while, but they are the only people who buy sections and bottles in student clubs because they don’t have a rave culture and remain fairly invisible. East Asians decked out in designer clothes sitting in the corner staring suspiciously, I feel, add a bit of character and authenticity if you pretend they’re Yakuza. Bharat patriots getting tanked up on VKs and scrapping over women they’ve just met (they are the only people who do this) do not add atmosphere; they add more bouncers, and migrant populations and their descendants create the need for bouncers from their own cohorts.
Drinking establishments in the first half of the 20th century only ever needed one bouncer, usually outsourced to boxers and veterans. The explosion of modern nightlife, discotheques, and large music venues in the late 1960s and 1970s to accommodate rock bands, cult followings and mosh pit crowd densities transformed the role into a massive commercial industry. Unregulated at the time, it fell to Maltese and Cypriot mafias pressing venue owners into hiring them for security, informing the owners their venue was in a ‘rough area’ and needed protection from troublemakers, and being the troublemakers themselves; they became the protection rackets that led to turf wars over doors.
Immigration from Eastern Europe created new demand for doormen from the same demographic pool specifically to deal with patrons of their own background. In the early 2000’s, perhaps every venue in north and east London had an Albanian bouncer specifically to reason and deal with his rowdy compatriots. It was the entirely predictable outcome of heathens who’d migrated from the Bronze Age straight to Britain, skipping the axial revolution. When you don’t turn the other cheek, when your native drinking culture is spirits, and you chug cocktails because they are “just juice bro”, having never had them before, then violence became routine. On the flip side, they had no inhibitions about enforcing club policy when it came to throttling those who weren’t their own as well. No sooner had Albanians mellowed out and learned about ‘the commons’ than other Eastern Europeans moved to Britain and recreated the same phenomenon, from drinking cultures where spirits and hand-wash fail a blind taste test.
Unlike Albanians, Poles are Christians who believe in ‘turning the other cheek’ and are in fact so Christian they started turning other people’s cheeks with their fists and apparently also baseball bats, which probably led to the closure of Madame Soho in 2017. The fridge-shaped Pole at the door has since been a recognisable fixture in every venue entrance in Britain. A drunken punch-up, a handshake, and going again the next week is a gentleman’s sport. The violence wasn’t unique to them, nor was it uniquely bad for the time. A punch-up is not, in the end, the same as bringing knives to block parties and Arsenal parades to settle ‘beef’.
In the 80s and 90s, London saw the rise of localised community firms within specific boroughs along explicitly racial lines. Venues playing black music genres hired reputable black firms, often the local gang, to manage the violence, crowd control and ensure the local gang itself wasn’t smashing windows and mugging drunk patrons. This didn’t mitigate the violence, of course, and in 2001 the Private Security Industry Act was passed to do away with the unregulated bouncer firms. This didn’t stop the Metropolitan Police from introducing Form 696 to assess the risk of violent criminality following a spate of shootings inside nightclubs by that same demographic.
The original form was explicitly targeted at black venues and events: it would ask managers for attendees’ ethnicity and the kind of music to be played. If the answers were ‘black’ to both, the Met, on top of their own focused police presence, would force venue managers to hire black bouncers or face having their alcohol licenses revoked. After backlash in 2008, the wording was changed to ask if there were ‘DJ’s or MC’s performing to a recorded backing track’, which famously led to high-profile artists like Giggs and P Money having their performances cancelled. To understand how bad the violence was, and could have been otherwise, the Met still deemed racial profiling necessary in this avenue against the backdrop of the Macpherson Report and the acceptance of institutional racism.
In 2017, the form was scrapped by Sadiq Khan, and the violence that prompted explicit racial profiling by the Met became an issue again immediately. Since 2017, Ricco Lounge (Kensington), Toro Gordo (Kensington), Concept Club (Mayfair), Pier One (Canning Town), Opium Nightclub (Soho), Cargo (Shoreditch), Circa Loca (Hounslow), The Socialite Bar (Muswell Hill), E10 Club (Leyton), Club 701 (Battersea), Pacha (Victoria), Studio 338 (Greenwich) and a slew of others have had to close or lose their licenses due to black violence, almost always involving arms, both inside and outside the club with many clubs actively hiding CCTV evidence to cover their own negligence. Oval Space in Bethnal Green had its premises license revoked when a gang member known as Chris Kaba smuggled in a handgun and opened fire inside a nightclub. For the same reason clubs have had to close, it is now also impossible to get a full premises license anyway, whether you’re in Lutfur Rahman’s Islamic Caliphate of Tower Hamlets or because the police won’t, or can’t, effectively police nightlife in London.
The omnipresence of Gambian bouncers manning the doors of even the most provincial Wetherspoons is to deal with this demographic and for establishments to avoid allegations of racism. It is why every single one of their events requires pre-booked tickets to filter out the trouble and the bad actors, and why clubs have to have airport-grade security procedures that have probably doubled queuing times. Eadn St Paul’s, the premier ‘lounge’ aimed at these people, has what you’d think was a PMC providing security for which you’d need Otto Skorzeny leading a raid to get in.
Clubbing is dead, and nightlife is the most ethnically segregated it has ever been. There is no multiracial youth listening to jungle and garage in a basement; there is no grime scene (not that its absence is worth ruing). There is no ‘Black British music’ scene that isn’t just a peripheral extension of the worldwide black music scene, a deal sealed by continuous migration from Africa. Aaron Bastani is not listening to Afro-Beats, Afro-Swing, Bashment, or Dancehall or going to their events. Aaron Bastani thinks Amapiano is ‘a nod to the jazz of the Windrush shebeens’. Aaron Bastani hasn’t been invited anywhere since he tried playing Stormzy when he was passed the aux.
Fortunately, the warehouse EDM rave and festivals will remain all-white oases - the tents, the mud, the MDMA and vodka in a resealed Evian bottle is too great a cultural and physiological gap for others to bridge. It retains the egalitarianism totally absent in London clubs, bar the Southwest yuppie belt, which can have a more even gender ratio because women actually pay for their own drinks. In the stretch from Lambeth, through Elephant & Castle, Southwark, circling to Shoreditch, the only way for clubs to compensate for ethnic women who think they should never have to pay for their own drinks is to then charge men extortionate entrance fees — Cargo in Shoreditch was charging £50 entry in 2019.
Higher-end clubs function like prostitution rings: table and bottle culture is not new nor is it foreign, but there are now dedicated apps for sleazy club promoters to scout girls for their guest lists with the condition that they remain sat at a table with Bedouins or Russians scoffing down chicken wings, and failure to adhere (they don’t even know themselves) will actually see them get kicked out by staff and blacklisted. Even that crowd is a dwindling one, and at least it meant they were parking their millions in London: the Miamification of clubbing, however, prompted by the ascension of hip-hop, now sees clubs like Tape London and Cirque De La Soir having to abdicate on their smart dress codes to accommodate drug dealers and the ‘as a man why are you not paying for my drinks?’ set, with neither actually dancing for fear of being asked ‘why you beggin’ it?’ and it is coming for a lot of people’s favourite spots.
I remember Scandal being the white man’s refuge, which also had the novel idea of keeping its hip hop nights from Monday to Thursday and its house nights from then on. White man stomping grounds like Blue Bird are now home to all white suits and crocodile leather shoes and what I think were Irish accents when I swung by for the first time in four years back in June, and I am not keen to find out what’s happened to Embargo — all roads seem to lead to cattle-pens like The Pear Tree and Infernos.
The new synthesis from this is thus the party restaurant, multi-floored establishments with live music, dining, separate bars and cocktail lounges shorn of the nightclub’s dodgiest elements. The Greeks did this first with their Bouzoukia (Turkish word meaning ‘broken’ as slang for the retuned lute; Smyrniotes apparently didn’t have a word for it in Greek when they landed in 1923) tradition of smashing plates on the floor, and paying to throw flowers at a live singer, and were the first to introduce the idea that you could eat and party at the same time. Elysee is still a good shout even today, especially with plate smashing apparently banned in Greece today on health and safety grounds. Turkish Cypriots arrived with the same tradition, adding cross-dressing belly dancers and other oriental intrigues to the growing Ottoman repertoire.
Albanians, Bosniaks, Bulgarians and Romanians all arrived but did away with the sotadism and realised you could just throw money rather than flowers directly at the singers; have belly dancers who are in fact women, and thus North London is full of these party restaurant lounges, sometimes nation-specific or homogenised to give you horrors such as ‘Balkan nights’. With cranial dimensions and Brachycephalic indices exclusive to those parts of the world, this is exactly what a janissary barracks must have looked like, with other novelties like emancipated Roma Gypsies who you would otherwise never see in public. You can imagine what goes on in joints named ‘PSG lounge’. Gaudy and foreign perhaps, but they don’t occupy prime real estate, and this is actually their culture, and it’s fun to LARP.
The worst are the overpriced chick restaurants in central London — Bagatelle, INCA, Piranha — with one-dimensional menus designed not with dining in mind, but bottle service beginning at 11pm and harlots dancing on people’s tables. London gets no reprieve from the Instagram scroungers and the Lebanese apostates of St Tropez described here before, but I’ve since thought about the moral implications. Imagine you’re a Palestinian kid who’s lost their home and most of their family only to see the monied Zagrosian diaspora doing the Dabka barefoot on tables, waving Hezbollah flags and screaming the lyrics to Boshret Kheir at the Maramia Cafe, using your plight to incense themselves. Lastly, and almost as bad as getting blown up by F35’s, is yer bird suddenly deciding she’s into ‘jazz nights’ and starts sending you TikToks of ‘The MAINE’, a gaudy new spot for the canaille who imagine themselves above the rest of us because they listen to the most sanitised genre of music of the 20th century, usually just pop songs but with a slightly exuberant, sweaty (no kidney’s?) fruit doing a jazz cover.
I have no policy recommendation, no bright vision for the future, nor words of hope because I’m not sure any of us really care about reviving it as an institution. You will be bringing your own vinyl to the bar, you will queue at this same bar and watch staff scramble around fixing drinks in the minute between Guinness pours, and you will watch them break glasses and hear Ash Sarkar let out a real patriotic “WHEYYY” all because Fenian superstitions take precedence over bottom lines and service. You will be sat outside thanks to the Al Fresco cabal only to be told you can’t smoke. You will be invited to London’s latest rooftop bar, situated on top of a two-floor building, not a skyscraper, so you don’t have a view of anything except antennas and the skyscrapers with actual views. You can’t look up and see the stars because my cloud-zapping white paper hasn’t been implemented yet, and you wouldn’t get to in the summer either because it’s light until 11pm and you’re shuffled back inside by then because the council demands it. Obviously, you can’t smoke. You will pay to run away and join a members club only to find the very same people you ran away from, or they’ve been forced to compromise on their famously stubborn rules of fraternity by doing something ridiculous like admitting women. You will be packed off to New Moon and The Lamb. You will listen to her set and watch her have a sort of mid-youth crisis where she decides she’s good at making house music.
We still have the festivals and the raves immune to demographic overhaul because centuries of selection pressures are required to filter out those who couldn’t develop a ‘constitution’ for the intoxication required for a multi-day bender. I’m not sure it will ever match Creamfields in 2019, where pyrotechnics caused four million pounds worth of damage after one Swedish House Mafia beat drop and probably gave thousands third-degree burns to their faces and they couldn’t tell because they were that cunted. You had to be there. I myself will be LARPing, most likely at a shisha bar, with female belly dancers, or, one would hope, an ethnically ambiguous harem, as did Ali Pasha of Yanina, who made it cool.
This article was written by Henry Reynolds Skelton, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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Substack is asking me to verify my age. How bad can an article about Soho House be?
The main highlight of our national decline is enjoying very well written laments like this one.