Now Fabric Is Closed, It's Up to You What Happens to British Nightlife

What do you do with your life? I mean, once you strip away eating, sleeping and shitting, which are necessary bodily functions. Your job doesn’t count, because you have to do that to earn money. Holidays don’t count either, because they are – by definition – breaks from your actual life. And we’re not including the time you spend staring at Netflix and drinking wine until you’re tired enough to go to sleep, because that’s not really an activity that features any human interaction, more just the passive ingestion of fictional plots and alcohol.

So when you strip away all that, what’s left?

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Do you worry that all you ever do, in your whole life, your actual free time, when you are not simply trying to continue your existence, is go to other people’s birthday parties?

Maybe not. Maybe you spend your evenings and weekends doing civil war re-enactments, learning French, playing in a jazz band and training to be on the team GB taekwondo team. But I’m willing to bet that when people think about what they’ve got on this weekend, it’s either someone’s birthday drinks, or nothing.

I thought about this last week, when Islington Council decided to close down Fabric, London’s most iconic super-club. People felt hurt over the decision in different ways: there was immediate grieving from the dance music community over the loss of a club which promoted its nights with love, expertise and a vested interest in almost every dance scene in the country. There was a wider sense of unease from Londoners that Fabric’s demise was a huge blow to the character of central London, an area which is already being dealt blow after blow – or, more accurately, Byron after Byron – as its once subversive neighbourhoods (Soho, Shoreditch, Camden) are bulldozed to make way for gourmet burger chains. Even the Tory press – who Islington Council perhaps thought could be relied upon to help propagate the moral panic around drug use in nightclubs – got their backs up at a nanny state trying to curtail everyone’s good time. The Spectator feared that “Bureaucracy is destroying the fabric of London’s nightlife”; the Telegraph said “Fabric’s closure is a saddening blow to British culture”.

But one phrase that keep being repeated, in every weepy comment piece and 9,000-word Facebook post about the loss of the club, was some variation of “I haven’t personally been in years, but…” The people who were sad about Fabric going were also admitting they hardly ever went there.

This is perhaps unsurprising. For some years now, studies have found young people drink at home more and go out less, often because they find nights out stressful and expensive. A survey conducted by the Guardian in March found that young people were too poor and too tired to enjoy clubs – that when they did go out they wanted to have conversations with close friends, not be lost in the melee.

This is not, as is often claimed, because millennials are more boring than previous generations. Young people work harder than the generations before them: many can’t afford to spend Friday night getting mangled and the rest of the weekend in recovery, because they’re expected to answer emails or work second jobs or apply for better jobs, just so they can afford their astronomical rents and bills. When they do go out they want minimum fuss. The clubs that are left don’t always seem that appealing when licensing restrictions are so tight that a night out means carrying an ID card, being patted down within an inch of your scrotum and being allowed timed smoking breaks in a smoking area the size of a toilet cubicle. Besides, there are now so few clubs left standing that to get into many of them on a good night you need to book weeks in advance.

Fabric was hardly struggling for punters; most weekends it was rammed to capacity, as one of the last London clubs that did foster a community. But a lot of other London nightlife serves mostly students, tourists and the once-in-a-blue-mooners. These are demographics that can never be an effective pressure group, because they are transient.

We need another big space like Fabric, a world-renowned club that people travel far and wide for. But we also need places where people can just go to be, without requiring a Facebook event to tell them what’s happening. Just ten years ago, London was overwhelmed with those spaces – weekly nights that fostered friendships and communities, places where you could show up on your own and know you’d probably bump into someone: Trash, White Heat, Chalk, YoYo!, FWD>>. Going out wasn’t something you had to iCal a month beforehand. Clubs were your night out, not somewhere you went at 2AM just to lose your mind.

Now Fabric has gone, we have to decide whether or not we truly value nightclubs, not just as an idea – a thing we like to have around – but actual places we want to make a part of our lives. If we do, it’s up to everyone to pressure councils, to start club nights, to go out more and stay in less, to eat less Byron burgers and more 6AM way-home Egg McMuffins. It’s up to people in their twenties and thirties to treat the maladies of modern living with dancing and drinking and real-life chirpsing, and not just go home after work to swipe Tinder and watch Narcos. If we really are sad about Fabric closing down, then we all need to go to fewer birthday parties.

@samwolfson