IMHO: Let’s find a way to make clubs safer, not shut them down

I remember my first ever Fabric.

And that isn’t a grammatical error there. A ‘first Fabric’ is, if you’re into clubbing, an experience akin to a first kiss, a first love or a first heartbreak. Because even if the first time your heart was broken was when you caught your school crush Tanya kissing your best mate Kev behind the bike shed that was your usual spot at lunch break in year six, you’re never going to forget that for the rest of your life. Similarly, I’ve never forgotten the first time I entered into the chambers of the Farringdon-based superclub that has been a part of London nightlife for 17 years.

Or at least it had been a part of it, until a sub-committee at Islington Council - after a six hour meeting (five hours of evidence, one hour of deliberation) - made the announcement on Tuesday 6 September 2016 that the club’s licence had been revoked. It's closed for good.

For many, this decision hasn’t come as a surprise: in mid-August, the Metropolitan Police applied an ‘interim suspension’ of its license, AKA closing it until further notice. This was the result of two tragic deaths associated with the club in the previous nine weeks, both of which were said to be the result of suspected drug overdoses.

It was then left up to Islington council to dangle the sword of Damocles over Fabric’s head.

At the interim stage, The Met issued this statement:

"Officers felt the need to act due to concerns about the safety of those attending the club because of the supply of class A drugs in the venue and the recent deaths of two young men linked to the club.”

Less than a month later and the Islington committee chair confirmed the club was to disappear from the scene it helped create:

"Searches at the venue were inadequate… Deaths at the club involved people who were very young,” they said. The report from the council went further: "The extent of the drug use was such that security and staff would have or should have been able to observe not only the use of drugs but also the effect of drug use on a large number of patrons."

I can't speak for the families of those victims of this tragic event. Who knows what they're going through or what action they would like to see taken, but I can't help but feel we're leading towards the wrong approach in the way this has been dealt with.

The closure of Fabric isn’t just an isolated incident. In fact, nearly half of the UK’s nightclubs have closed down just in the last 10 years, according to the Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers (ALMR), a drop from 3,144 in 2005 to just 1,733 last year, and with the closure of Shapes, Passing Clouds and Studio 338 just in the past few months alone, that figure is steadily decreasing. This is down to a number of reasons, but one of the most prominent, and one that has obviously affected Fabric over the years is drugs, and perhaps drugs policy.

The irony is, without a well-regulated nightlife, the only place young people would be able to congregate at night would be on the streets, illegal warehouse raves or pop up events, none of which have the well-trained medical staff and operational systems that clubs like Fabric had.

The contention that the Met had with Fabric was over the tragic deaths of two clubbers from overdosing. It seems like drugs are still a major problem in clubland all across the nation. But with the recent successful trials of drugs testing at Secret Garden Party, Warehouse Project and Parklife, isn’t this something that should be replicated nationwide as standard? When Fabric was given it’s “interim suspension” I spoke to Alan Miller, head of the Night Time Industries Association, an organisation that champions the importance of UK nightlife, not just culturally but to the British economy as well.

“The work that criminologist Fiona Measham has been doing with The Loop has been extremely important. Evidence has come back now that a very large proportion of drugs were actually handed back in - due to tests. That means toxicity and actual composition were tested and people made choices based on reality.”

Steve Rolles of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, who helped negotiate the drugs-testing facilities at Secret Garden Party Festival recently, certainly thought that this initiative was helping to reduce risk.

“Around a quarter of people who brought in their drugs then asked us to dispose of them when they discovered that they had been mis-sold or were duds. We were taking dangerous substances out of circulation.”

Perhaps it is counter-intuitive to blame the deaths of people taking drugs on the place they take drugs in. Surely if the governments, councils and Met Police really cared about drug-related deaths, they would pour money into providing safety around the substances that, although they know to be illegal, also must know are being taken en masse. It seems that, like the very drugs they seem have limited control over flooding in through airports, docks and trains into the country, nightlife itself might soon become even more dangerous because it’s unregulated, outlawed, illegal, underground. Why not invest in clubbers’ safety, rather than taking a blanket approach and just shutting things down? Alan concurs:

“We know what goes in our food and drinks - but the prohibited nature of controlled substances ensures continued mystery and tragedy unless we get to grips with it. Trying to close down clubs - as though they manufacture drugs - rather than them coming through customs border controls and then into our streets, through prison checks and all over the place - is simply hypocritical and counterproductive.”

People at these clubs like Fabric aren’t giving their customers drugs; the drugs are just ingrained into the essence of our society. Trying to fight them by removing the safest spaces for young people to go and enjoy themselves is like trying to battle alcoholism by knocking down the pub, but keeping the 24 hour off-license next door stocked to the gills with cheap booze. People will still drink the alcohol because it’s readily available, so why not make it safer for them to do that than just leaving them to their own devices and seeing what happens? Why, instead of just seeing things in black and white, can’t we as a society see that situations have nuance, and act accordingly? Regarding Fabric, Alan felt passionately about its survival:

“Fabric is one of the UK's top operators, with a gold standard of professionalism. They do things most other clubs could never manage in terms of keeping their customers safe and a decent night out for all.”

That all sounds well and good if I was a strong advocate of dance music. But if I approached this topic from another perspective, perhaps from a person’s view that hasn’t been influenced by a decade of basslines, clubs, sweating and hugs, would I care? What would it really matter if nightclubs closed down if I didn’t listen to house and techno? Would it really negatively affect cities, or the UK at large? Alan, not surprisingly, has some statistics to show that it most certainly would:

“With a £66bn per annum revenue contribution and almost 8% of employment, nightlife is hugely important to Britain. From business rates and taxes, to the disproportionate amount of young people that are employed, it matters. It is one of UK's dynamic creative sectors when the rest of the economy has been crawling along with tiny digit, very low growth. It is part of our cultural value. It’s why 300 million visits happen around the year.”

UK nightlife isn’t perfect. It still has a long way to go to rival the more educated and thoughtful approach that our European neighbours like Amsterdam and Berlin (who both regularly have drug testing in clubs citywide) have had for years. But it isn’t being helped by a government and police that seem intent on seeing it as a bane rather than the boon that so many other cities have accepted clubs to be. If we carry on at this rate, we risk entering a prohibition-style era for nightlife in general, where spaces to go and congregate for young people will be so few and far between that those young people will make their own, less safe, less regulated and ultimately more dangerous versions themselves.

We have a chance to learn the lessons and improve UK nightlife from the results of these tragedies. Why didn’t we take that chance instead of just using it to shut down one of the only things that still made Britain an attractive place to live for anyone under 35?