Britain’s vanishing nightlife

With iconic clubs like Corsica Studios and G-A-Y closing, Britain’s nightlife is declining. Sam O reflects on what the loss of these spaces mean, for community, for queer freedom and for the right to collective joy.

The announced closure of London nightclubs, Corsica Studios and G-A-Y hit me harder than any nightclub closure normally would. For decades these venues were more than just dance floors, they were spaces of experimentation, queer joy and collective belonging. Sadly, these closures are not isolated cases. Across Britain nightlife is being suffocated by soaring prices, gentrification, tight regulations and commercialisation.

This isn’t simply about there being fewer places to have a Friday night drink or dance. It’s about the destruction of community spaces. And crucially it’s about how capitalism is built to restrict joy, police bodies and ultimately prioritise profit over people and their freedom and autonomy.

Since 2020, one in four late licence venues have closed their doors for good and 16 per cent of British towns and cities have lost all late night venues. For millions of people the choice after 10pm is a bleak Wetherspoons or the night bus home. Even in London, supposedly a ’24 hour city’, many small clubs are on life support, squeezed between landlords hiking rents and councils tightening licensing rules.

For those who still want to go out, the costs are huge. Tickets that once cost a fiver now regularly top £30. Drinks are extortionate and the last train home often leaves before the headliner’s first track. Taking an Uber or taxi home alone, a necessity for many women and LGBTQ+ people facing harassment, is often unaffordable. Under conditions of wages falling in real terms, insecure work and a spiralling cost of living, nightlife is increasingly a luxury, excluding working class people.

The decline of clubs cannot be separated from the wider gentrification of our cities. Developers throw up luxury flats beside long-established venues, then residents and landlords bombard councils with noise complaints. Local authorities, faced with a shortage of housing, side with property values over community spaces. The result is sound restrictions, early closing times, tighter policing and eventually closure.

It’s these same processes, that prioritise luxury apartments and developers, that hit the most vulnerable hardest. Homeless people for example will face tighter policing and oppressive and hostile infrastructure such as anti-sleep spikes and by-laws that ban tents. Local residents on lower incomes, unable to pay increasing rents, will be forced into cheaper ‘commuter towns’ or precarious and unsafe housing.

Combined these situations raise a big question: who belongs in the city after dark? The same forces that evict working class families from their homes are pushing affordable nightlife to the margins. Cultural life becomes sanitised, depoliticised and sold back to us at inflated prices.

Britain’s ruling class has always been suspicious of working class nightlife. Drug use, queerness, sexuality and pleasure itself are treated as threats. Not because the wealthy abstain from them but because they want to keep them behind closed doors. The rich still indulge, in private members’ clubs, expensive night clubs and private events, insulated from scrutiny. But when working class people indulge in joy through intoxication and intimacy it becomes a problem for the ruling class to manage. 

The ruling class want the city and the people in it, to function for work not pleasure, unless they can massively monopolise on it. For bosses a hungover worker is an unproductive one. Nightlife for working class people is a break from their labour that the system relies on. That’s one reason why the state policies it so heavily, not to necessarily destroy pleasure altogether, but to contain it so it doesn’t threaten work.

The continuing stigma, deregulation and policing of drugs fuels offputting surveillance and repression inside venues. Bag searches, sniffer dogs and CCTV reduce nights out to airport security queues. Meanwhile, actual safety is left mostly unaddressed. Women and LGBTQ+ people still face harassment and violence on the dance floor. Some reports suggest tighter security adds more dangers to drug consumption. For example someone may take all their drugs unsafely, in one go, before reaching security. So harm reduction strategies such as trained medics and consumption spaces are needed as an alternative.

In the vacuum left by small independent clubs, corporate ‘super clubs’ dominate. Clubbing and raving becomes another consumer product, stripped of its history as a site of working class and queer self expression and sometimes resistance. The culture that birthed jungle, garage, grime and house music is hollowed out and pushed to the edges, in favour of Be At One and club appearances by TikTok influencers.

Free market capitalists in the Labour and other parliamentary parties will argue that the decline of nightlife is simply the market adjusting to lower demand. But nightlife is not dead. ‘Music tourism’ and festival attendance has been rising, despite also facing restrictions, especially in cities. Some 23.5 million people attended live music events or festivals in 2024, up 23 per cent from the previous year, says industry body UK Music.

Beyond the gaze of councils and developers, the free party and rave scenes remain alive and relatively stable. These gatherings take over fields, warehouses and unused spaces. They survive precisely because they reject the structures strangling formal nightlife, no landlords, licences, curfew or dynamic tickets pricing. Of course, these events face repression, police raids, seizures and criminalisation. They can also be unsafe, with little infrastructure for accessibility or consent. But they point towards something vital, the possibility of collective joy outside capitalism’s control.

The erosion of nightlife is not trivial. In a society already ravaged by loneliness, poor mental health and ongoing austerity, the closure of clubs means the loss of some of the last remaining community spaces. Parks close at night, libraries and youth centres are near non-existent; pubs are either gentrified to ‘gastro pubs’ or shut down. Clubs and raves are among the few spaces where people can come together without the mediation of work or family.

For queer people, especially, clubs have been pushed to become lifelines. They are often the only available sanctuaries where self expression is possible, where safety is negotiated collectively, where joy is not shameful but celebrated. To lose these spaces is to force people back into isolation, or into the hands of a commercialised scene that excludes working class queer people.

The decline of nightlife is also about power. Who controls the city, who decides whose noise counts, whose bodies are welcome, whose joy is legitimate? Defending nightlife doesn’t require fighting it as a sole issue. It means fighting on multiple fronts, resisting gentrification and the developers who would rather build luxury flats than allow communities to connect and have fun. Demanding rent controls and public subsidies for cultural spaces and for the decriminalisation and legalisation of recreational drugs so that drug use can be safe and those with addictions treated with care. But above all, it means fighting for the right to joy. Collective joy and our own happiness must be defended, we deserve it. It reminds us that another world is possible.

Nightlife in Britain is under attack. But it can be defended by fighting for a new culture of liberation. The free parties, co-ops, grassroots queer nights and DIY spaces show the appetite. It’s our job as revolutionary socialists to push that anger into anti-capitalist resistance.