A Love Letter to Venue, the Best Club I've Never Been To

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A Love Letter to Venue, the Best Club I've Never Been To

In praise of the SE London institution that we bet you've never been to either.

It's a scene I've watched unfold hundreds of times over the years. Friday night and I'm sat inside the Marquis of Granby in New Cross—arguably London's finest pub, save for the effervescent and ever-pleasant Brockley Barge—gulping down pint after pint after pint of Guinness Extra Cold, each mouthful of rich, creamy, thick stout taking me closer to a kind of pissed paradise. At some point, around ten or so, everyone's cigarette breaks become longer, and eventually the indoor table—the table you've turned into three tables—is swapped for the palatial pleasures of wobbling about on the pavement, watching the world go by down the A2.

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There's smoke and spilled beer and the sound of people allowing themselves the briefest respite from reality. Later on, when the garlic sauce is stiffening on your jeans, and your fingers stink of the greasy innards of a hundred crisp packets, you'll lie there in bed, head spinning, wondering about one thing and one thing only: The Venue.

Situated directly over the road from the Marquis is a South East London institution, a nightclub that proves that nightlife isn't as dead as it may seem. Despite its proximity to the Bunker Club in Deptford, and the trio of clubs wedged into the far reaches of Rye Lane up in Peckham, you're not going to hear any greyscale techno or double-jointed deep house bleeding out of the club as you amble down New Cross Road. The Venue is, in essence at least, the kind of provincial club that we've lionized and idealized time after time on THUMP. Venue, with its seven separate themed areas—which range from the Irish-themed Fagans, to rock and indie room Star Bar—and £1.00 entry before midnight for ladies, students, nurses and members, is clubbing a la Doncaster, Derby, or Dereham, slapped opposite an art school library and nestled between a William Hill and a kebab shop called Flames.

By the time the Marquis' doors are bolted, and you've bolted as far as your tired little legs'll take you from the inevitable lock-in, the queue outside Venue is snaking down to St Johns station. Supersized taxis emerge out of the wilderness of Albany Park, Bexley, Crayford, depositing their glammed-up human cargo into the beating heart of the night. Miniskirts mingle with freshly pressed Ralph Lauren shirts, and New Cross begins to smell of a thousand bottles of Joop battling for olfactory dominance with the fleshy tang that pumps out of Chick Chicken day and night.

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While you and your mates convince yourself that admiring anti-fascist stickers plonked onto lampposts outside the pub is going to make the world a better place, thickset bouncers stand solidly still, stoic and unsmiling, preparing themselves for another raucous night at a club that's taken on an almost mythical edge.

The first thing you notice about Venue late at night or in broad daylight is the unabashed billboarding that coats the exterior of the club, offering untold pleasures. Venue prides itself on far more than its sheer size, or the variety of its seven rooms, or the rooftop smoking area which is "the perfect spot to take in the night air, chill for a while and take in the spectacularly illuminated city skyline." No, you'll also see is poster after poster advertising the tribute acts that fill the place each and every weekend. From Spice Girls 2 to Mini Mix, The Taylor Swift Experience to Coldplace, the hills are constantly alive with the sound of someone else's music. The tribute act experience is where Venue differentiates itself from the rest of the club spaces that congregate south of the river. In an age where authenticity is valued over pretty much everything else, it is a proudly inauthentic and artificial space. Which is why I've become so bessotted with it.

For the best part of eight years now I've found myself walking past Venue, imagining just what it's like inside, wondering if I've got a smart enough jeans and shoes combination to get myself accepted by the doormen. Because reader, sadly, I've never actually been to Venue.

The reasons that I've never signed up for a membership and spent my Saturday nights banging down Jaegerbombs at an alarming rate is simple: actually going there would dispel all the illusions I have about it, and I'd be forced to accept that my fantasy has no basis in reality. And when that happens, my dreams about what Venue is and what it does and what it represents would be dashed. I'd be left nursing a cocktail in Barbarella, the Jane Fonda movie inspired room "playing old skool 90's anthems guaranteed to get your freak on!"

Because Venue, for me and many others, has become totemic. It's a reminder that nightlife really does matter, and more importantly, obscurity doesn't. There's a strange purity to clubs like Venue—stately nocturnal homes populated by the pissed and alienated, the weekend warriors who care more about having fun than hearing the latest Fade to Mind release. As aware as I am of the romanticisation at play here, I can't ever look at that lump of a building—a building that vies for attention with the outline of Canary Wharf in the distance and the various architectural abominations authorised by the wardens of Goldsmiths in the New Cross night sky—without feeling incredibly glad that it exists.

Even if I know I'll never visit.

Josh is on Twitter