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News from London’s nightlife scene can often be pretty bleak. Recently, the legendary Corsica Studios announced that it will be shutting, and Soho’s G-A-Y said goodbye for good. But in some tidings worth celebrating for the city’s night owls, multi-arts space Evolutionary Arts Hackney (aka EartH) has just been given the green light to stay open until 5am on Fridays and Saturdays.
EartH opened in 2018 in the former art-deco building of the Savoy Cinema, launched by the same people behind Village Underground. It hosts comedy and music gigs and currently keeps the party going until 3.30am on weekends, but now, Hackney Council has accepted its bid to stay open even longer.
The venue says that the extra opening hours will allow it to put on a fuller programme and help ensure its long-term survival as a grassroots venue.
Auro Foxcroft, the venue’s director, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: ‘The profit margins for running music venues are so thin, there's only the resilience there to withstand very minor shocks. Making this shift enables us to fit in a new early live music shows before. It creates a lot more programming opportunities.’
He added: ‘EartH’s vision is to present a truly broad program to reflect the wonderfully diverse communities of Hackney. To this end, we have recently hosted artists from across the globe, [including] Mali, Nigeria, Taiwan, Turkey, India, Argentina, and we would like to do more of that.’
The request wasn’t without opposition, though. Some local residents urged the council to reject the application, citing fears over people ‘loitering’ around the theatre’s doors early in the morning, the already ‘unrelenting’ noise coming from the building and feeling unsafe due to crowds spilling out on the road and in some cases taking drugs on the street.
But other locals are supportive of the idea. One Dalston resident told LDRS that EartH has been doing a ‘stellar job’ of balancing entertainment and residents’ needs. She said: ‘It’s absolutely noisy as hell sometimes, [and] there’s always going to be some bad eggs who are drunk who throw rubbish around, but I don’t think that’s a problem unique to EartH or to Dalston.’
One condition of the later license is that no-one be allowed to enter the venue after 2am. In response to being awarded the license, Foxcroft said: ‘Now, we have more certainty – to invest in equipment, to take more artistic risks, and to do the things grassroots music venues do best: creating a future not only for themselves but for artists and fans.’
For more places where you can party into the early hours, see our list of London’s best nightclubs.
One of London’s most legendary clubs is returning for this weekend.
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