Night Moves in a Changing City: Transformations to the Spaces and Times of London’s Electronic Dance Music Cultures

In the 2010s, London lost half of its nightclubs. Gentrification and restrictive licensing legislation contributed toward a state of spatialised precarity, later intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Popular and academic discourses focussed on a narrative of loss, but this failed to account for the emergence of new spaces and events during this period, reflecting more nuanced transformations to the space-time cultures and economies of London’s night.

In this thesis, I explore electronic dance music’s relationship to contested notions of the night-time as cultural territory, economic category, and site of urban governance. I argue how urban transformations, institutionalisation, and technology are shaping contemporary nightlife, with a particular focus on how these factors impact dance music culture’s potential to produce unique forms of collectivity. My research is built around a series of case studies, representing examples of a spatio-temporal shift in London’s club culture from night into day. I explore daytime events and temporary urbanism at super club Printworks; listening practices and culture-led regeneration at an audiophile bar in King’s Cross; electronic music programming at museums and galleries; ideologies of wellness at sober event Morning Gloryville; as well as audiovisual livestreaming and the role it played in sustaining musical communities during the pandemic.

Building on the emergent field of ‘night studies’, I conceptualise the urban night as a time-space of alterity and possibility. Following this, I situate club culture’s temporal shifts within profit driven colonisations of the night, refracted through ostensibly supportive attempts to reimagine London as a ‘24-hour city’. At the same time, my thesis highlights emergent nightlife practices, which complicate structural narratives of commercialisation. These draw attention not only to the radical potential of nightlife’s reimagined spaces and times, but also to the complicity of many dance music practitioners in reproducing the institutional logics of the night-time economy.