Change is grindingly inevitable, and there’s not much point in fighting it. Areas you love get bulldozed, music venues close, society changes, the way we spend our time changes, the way we interact with the world changes. We adapt, we move on, and the revolution or the party or whatever, finds somewhere else to happen. It always does. Some changes, though, hurt more than others.
The redevelopment happening around Tottenham Court Road station in London is one that really stings, and not just because the quest for a posher looking train station has already taken two of the capital’s most endearingly grimy venues from us, in the Astoria and the Metro. Last week those changes finally rumbled further south, as the much-feared renovation of Denmark Street began.
Nicknamed Tin Pan Alley (because streets sound cooler when you name them after bits of New York), the 100-yard stretch right on the lip of Soho was, once upon a time, the centre of the UK music industry. The NME (or to give it its full title at the time ‘The Musical Express, incorporating Accordion Times’) and Melody Maker both had their early offices on the street, most of the major music publishing and management companies of the 50s and 60s were based there and the strip housed recording studios put to use by the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and Elton John. Bowie spent the 60s sipping coffee in the La Giocondo cafe, the Sex Pistols rehearsed at number 6 and, probably best of all, two of Bananarama actually lived there in the late 70s. Of course that’s the distant past – the managers, magazines and labels long ago moved on (though the Pistols left some grafitti to remember them by and since the 90s Denmark Street has been a promenade of near-identical guitar shops. We probably didn’t need all of them, but that’s not the point.
This was a tiny corner of London that retained its personality and escaped the signs of soft corporate power that pervade almost every other high street in the land – no chain stores or branded coffee shops, no Subways or McDonalds, and unlike the traditional “alternative paradise” of Camden High Street, no “I Heart London” keyrings, faux-wooden iPhone covers and badges saying “free the weed”. Admittedly all of that can be found just round the corner on Charing Cross Road, but its absence here felt meaningful. The big players may have moved out, but Denmark Street remained a bastion of the city’s genuine alternative culture, and one of the shrinking islands of central London that didn’t seem designed exclusively for tourists, hipsters or rich people, where musicians, metalheads, rockabillys, punks and indie kids, old and young, still felt at home. Central to this, at least until last week, were the 12 Bar Club and Enterprise Studios.
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