The Reopening and What It Revealed
When clubs reopened in 2021 after the pandemic closures, something was different. The conversation before reopening had been primarily about economics — the financial damage to venues, the loss of livelihoods for promoters and performers and bar staff. What the reopening revealed was that the period of closure had done something to the culture too: had clarified, for the people who cared most about it, what they were returning to and why it mattered.
London's underground club scene in 2022 felt charged in a way I hadn't felt in it for years. Not the charge of novelty — novelty is easy and usually cheap — but the charge of necessity. People dancing because they needed to be dancing. People in rooms together because the alternative had been rooms alone. A quality of attention and gratitude that the scene had been too cool to perform before the lockdowns changed everyone's relationship to the option of absence.
The specific venues I keep returning to in my memory of this period are all mid-sized at most — Fold, Corsica Studios, venues in Peckham and Dalston and Hackney that have been doing this work for years without mainstream recognition. The nights I remember are the ones where the music and the room and the particular group of people who showed up on that particular Friday aligned into something that felt like more than the sum of its parts.
What the Scene Is Actually Doing
The London underground club scene is not one thing. It's a constellation of communities — Black queer club culture and its multiple lineages, the predominantly South Asian scenes that have been developing in East London, the diasporic African club cultures, the various electronic music subcultures that have been evolving since the early days of UK garage and jungle and grime — that occasionally overlap and more often operate in parallel.
What unites them is a commitment to the club as a space for communities that don't always have spaces, as a place where the norms of the dominant culture are temporarily suspended, as a site for collective experience that is simultaneously physical and political and joyful.
The mainstream can't touch this because the mainstream operates on the logic of broad appeal, of the averaged preference, of the experience designed for nobody in particular because it needs to work for everybody. The underground runs on specificity. The best underground nights are for particular people in particular moods looking for particular things, and the specificity is what makes them irreplaceable.
What Might Be Lost
I'm aware that writing about the underground with this kind of enthusiasm is its own form of threat — that visibility, once sufficient, changes the thing made visible. The history of subcultural London is also the history of scenes discovered, amplified, commodified, and ultimately diluted into something that resembles the original without being it.
The venues are under pressure from developers, from rising rents, from the economic logic that treats a former warehouse as potential luxury apartments rather than a cultural infrastructure that has generated something irreplaceable.
This is the same story every time. It doesn't have a good ending usually. But the thing itself, while it's happening, while the rooms are full and the music is right and the people who need to be there are there — that thing is still happening.
I'm still going. So are the people who know.
The nights I remember from 2022 are not the big ones. They're the smaller gatherings — fifty people in a room the right size for fifty people, a sound system the right size for the room, music that knew exactly who it was for. The intimacy of those nights is what I'm describing when I say the underground is doing something the mainstream can't touch. The mainstream can't be intimate at scale. The underground doesn't try to be anything other than what it is.
Those rooms still exist. The people who run them are still running them, still booking the music that matters, still creating the conditions for something to happen. I'm still showing up. Some things are worth showing up for.
