As I sit on the loo at The Love Inn, head spinning, working my way through various profound statements scribbled on the the vibrating door (truly Twitter’s predecessor), one leg up to the door as pure animal strength replaces the need for any sort of functioning lock, I’m not thinking about architecture. As I bounce about next to enormous sound systems, in a careless Russian roulette for indefinite loss of hearing, I’m not thinking about the design and use of club space. And yet it forms every aspect of my experience. From the slightly disorienting fog that fills the room at The Love Inn, creating a theatrical silhouette-scape, to the eternally confusing and apparently endless maze that is Lakota, Bristol has a frankly awe-inspiring range of club spaces. In Bristol, every clubber’s need is catered for.
The design of nightclubs is unique; it has to allow for the movement of sound, light, and bodies in a way that no other space would. So, what makes a club well-designed? And where did the nightclub come from?
The real predecessor of the nightclub is the ballroom. Designs focused on space for choreographed movement – not quite the sardined experience you get at the Brass Pig on a Wednesday – and spaces were usually ornamented and polished to match the dancing. The modern club as we know it evolved from the nightclubs of the 1840s and ‘50s in New York like McGlory’s and the Haymarket, hiding spots for illegal gambling, prostitution and liquor sales. Prohibition in 1920s America led to the birth of the speakeasy, and in occupied France, jazz and bebop music and various dances were banned by the Nazi regime for their ‘American influences’, which created a basement discothèque culture we often see in today’s clubs.
The nightclub was born out of resistance to political oppression. Look at the radical clubs in 1960s Italy, often created in response to the growing social and political unrest, such as the divide between the north and south and anti-Vietnam war protests. The Piper Club, opened in 1965 in Rome, was a space where pop art, music and performance intertwined. Other Italian clubs hosted radical theatre performances, underground music and even included vegetable gardens (see Gruppo 999 below).
The club has its roots (quite literally) in subversion: politically and socially – it’s OK to get off with four different people in one night right next to your friends, or to throw up in the smoking area. Under cover of darkness and smoke machines, we all become silhouettes, moving in unison. There’s an undeniable freedom in this invisibility.
Many of Bristol’s best clubs are repurposed spaces: Motion is a reused Victorian factory building, Loco Klub was once a railway workers’ club, Lakota a brewery. The makeshift architecture of the club is central to its appeal – even if it’s an established club, there’s a sense of excitement when you’re partying somewhere you’re not meant to be.
If the nightclub is an escape from reality, the smoking area is an escape from the escape. Some of my most treasured memories are set against a backdrop of cigarette smoke, people vomiting, k-holing, drunkenly sloppy kissing. There is something so freeing about being outside, winter air biting at your skin, finally being able to hold audible (but maybe not the most coherent) conversations. Restricted smoking areas, those with bouncers telling you to stay back, waiting for you to get to the end of a cigarette so they can verbally shove you back inside (as in the late Mbargo and Brass Pig) lose the central meaning of the smoking area. This is thankfully not the case in smoking areas at The Crown (literally just a street), Lakota (massive), and even Cosies (fittingly cosy with its candle-lit wooden benches under dingy vaults). The smoking area is an inbetween space which allows us a moment of meditation before re-entering the magical realm of dark rooms and pounding D&B – and one that every good club has to get right.
A friend once excitedly exclaimed to me that we were in ‘the pancreas of The Crown’ when we moved to the second smaller room underground. This statement returns to me now as quite profound: the club is like a body in ways – it can gain a sort of sentience. The sense that we are in a living, breathing organism connects us with the space. The club promises to look after us and we promise to get hammered (definitely a good deal).
