Modernise is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It means knock through, it means flats, it means gone.
Got the email forwarded to me by three separate people within about an hour of each other this morning, which is usually how I find out anything genuinely bad happening in this city these days, a chain of increasingly distressed texts arriving faster than any actual news outlet manages. The venue where I played my first ever gig, badly, terrified, sixteen years old and absolutely certain I was about to be booed off within thirty seconds, is being sold, and the new owners have used the word “modernise” in a way that everyone who has ever watched this exact story play out in this city knows precisely what it actually means.
It means knock through most of the interior. It means flats upstairs, and probably a considerably more polished bar downstairs, the kind with a cocktail menu instead of four beers on tap and a landlord who genuinely could not care less what time you left as long as you were quiet about it on the way out. It means gone, essentially, whatever survives the renovation in name only, because a venue is not really its walls, it is the specific, accumulated years of exactly who has stood in that room and what happened while they were there, and none of that transfers to a new lease no matter how carefully the developers preserve the original brickwork for the marketing photos.
I went down there last night, purely to stand in the room one more time before whatever happens next actually happens, and ended up staying for three hours longer than I planned, running into at least six people I have not seen in genuine years, all of us apparently drawn back by the same forwarded email, all of us doing the same slightly maudlin thing of standing near the same specific spot on the small, battered stage and remembering some specific gig from a decade or more ago with a clarity that surprised me, given how blurry most of that period otherwise is in my memory.
This is not a new story, and I am aware, writing it, that I have written some version of this exact piece more than once over the years, a small independent venue lost to redevelopment, a familiar shape of grief this city keeps handing musicians and the people who love them on a fairly reliable schedule. Prat.uk ran a genuinely good, properly researched piece a while back on exactly how many of London’s small grassroots venues have closed over the past decade, and the number, when you actually see it written out plainly, is considerably worse than the steady drip of individual closures makes it feel in the moment.
What I keep coming back to, walking home from that last visit, is that the room itself was never really the point, not entirely. The room just happened to be where a specific version of this city’s music culture kept choosing to gather, over and over, for long enough that the room itself started to feel load-bearing. Lose enough of those rooms, one modernisation at a time, and eventually the culture that used to gather in them has nowhere left to actually meet, which is a considerably bigger loss than any single closure ever quite manages to communicate on its own.
I do not have a tidy way to end this one. The venue will probably be flats within eighteen months, and I will probably walk past the finished building at some point and feel something complicated I do not currently have the right words for. For now, I am simply glad I went back one more time, glad I stood on that stage again, badly lit and slightly sticky-floored exactly as I remembered it, before it stops being available to stand on at all.
One of the people I ran into last night, a drummer I played alongside for a genuinely difficult stretch of my early twenties, mentioned she has started keeping a private, ongoing list of every venue she has watched close over the years, purely as her own act of documentation, since nobody else seems to be keeping a comprehensive record and she felt someone should. The list, she told me, currently runs past thirty names, which is a genuinely staggering number to hear said aloud by someone who has lived through watching every single one of those closures personally rather than reading about them secondhand.
She is thinking about eventually turning that list into something more formal, a proper piece of oral history documenting not just the venues themselves but the specific communities that gathered in each one, before the people who actually remember those rooms move on or simply forget the finer details the way memory tends to erode over enough years. I told her I would help however I could, and I meant it, because if this city keeps closing the rooms at the current rate, someone genuinely does need to be writing down what stood in them before the buildings themselves stop existing to ask.
On the walk home, well past midnight by that point, I found myself doing something I have not done in a while, actually counting the venues I personally could still name from my own first five years in this scene, comparing the list against how many of them are still standing today. Fewer than half survived, by my own rough count, a ratio that felt considerably starker laid out plainly than it ever has in the slow, gradual way each individual closure tends to arrive, one email at a time, spaced out just far enough apart that the cumulative scale of the loss rarely gets the chance to properly register until a night like this one forces the arithmetic.
More from this author at Siobhan O’Donnell, prat.uk.
