Inside London's illegal rave renaissance
On Saturday nights around 11pm, hundreds of young Londoners gather at train stations and in car parks after the first location — or “loco” — drops into an encrypted group chat. An hour or two later, they’re dancing inside abandoned office blocks, shuttered restaurants and empty warehouses as generators hum and bass reverberates through buildings long forgotten by the city.
By 3am, there might be 2,000 people inside — more than many licensed clubs can legally hold. Sometimes police stand outside while organisers invoke squatters’ rights. Sometimes they never arrive at all. The conventional night out might be dying a slow death, but the free party movement is thriving, whether inside London or in fields, forests or barns outside the city. Forget the polished, Instagram-friendly sound dominating much of today’s club scene. The music you’ll hear at these parties will span donk, psytrance, techno and tekno, a raw, fast-paced electronic music genre born out of the free party movement.
“It’s clearly growing in a way that it hasn’t done for a while,” says Aaron Trinder, the director of Free Party: A Folk History. “I think that’s down to the lack of an alternative for people.”
Spiralling ticket prices, widespread venue closures and increasingly heavy-handed security have pushed some young Londoners away from licensed nightlife and towards illegal parties, where entry is often little more than a suggested £5-10 donation. In return, many say they recover something missing from conventional clubbing: freedom. And a can of Stella for £2.50.
“For young partygoers, going to a club has become increasingly challenging, and that’s why the free party scene has started bubbling again,” says Alessandro Ugo, the director of F[r]EE: Behind the Scenes of the Free Party Culture. “Free parties are self-managed, you are part of the party. How you behave affects the vibe.”
Photographer Yushy has attended more than 150 unlicensed parties over the past five years and last year published his book, Section 63: Documenting Underground London Raves. He found a scene largely hostile to social media — and to documentation more generally. That means people are more likely to be immersed in the moment and less concerned about appearances.
“I could look at somebody who was completely different to me and think, we made it into this together,” he says. “We waited two or three hours for the location, we ran away from the police, but we’re here together as one unit.”
On one occasion, he recalls partying in a former Gordon Ramsay restaurant in central London. “There were about 200 or 300 people there raving and we could just see Leicester Square underneath us,” he says. “People were just sitting in booths talking to each other while drum and bass played.” After years of partying in abandoned buildings across the capital, he came away convinced of “how empty London really is”.
The scene also attracts opportunists seeking to disrupt the convivial fun — selling balloons and substandard drugs, stealing phones and escalating conflicts.
A well-known sound system crew organised a party, London’s Calling Vol. 2, which was attended by a few thousand opposite the closed Printworks club in Rotherhithe at the beginning of this year, but they vowed never to do so in the capital again. “Many of our crew and staff were assaulted, had weapons pulled on them, and some were hospitalised while trying to keep everyone safe,” they said in a statement circulated on Telegram. “The same problem has followed London parties for years now: people turning up with pathetic rivalries, egos, weapons, bringing street politics into spaces that are meant to be about music and freedom.”
But the party will go on, whether inside the capital or not, even as organisers risk punishment and larger parties are less common as they are more likely to get busted with the advent of the internet.
In 1994, John Major’s government made free parties illegal but the burgeoning acid house scene largely found a home in licensed venues. Now history has come full circle after interest surged after the pandemic.
“There will always be a newer, younger generation with enough courage to say, ‘OK, I’m gonna start a crew, squat that building and start throwing parties’,” says Ugo. Despite the risks, the movement is no longer as marginal as it once seemed.
The annual Night Time Industries Association report in February reported on an underground resurgence, with free parties and unlicensed raves numbering about 1,350 parties per year — roughly four per cent of all UK electronic music events.
Already, the mainstream is starting to co-opt the trend. Last year, people broke into Ministry of Sound and held an illegal party, though it soon emerged it was a marketing stunt.
The essence of a free party, however, cannot be manufactured. What keeps people coming back is something that cannot easily be commercialised.
“In a free party you feel more welcome, you feel you’re part of a community,” says Ugo. “Many people think ‘free’ means free of charge, but a free party is free in your mind.”