Triangulating The Scene
Words by Jamie Brett | 10.04.24
The Bermondsey Triangle has lived out a multitude of forms, functions and identities whilst maintaining its topographic triangular form since the mid-19th century. The overarching structure of the Bermondsey Triangle is straddled into place between two major railway bridges that were constructed over the Grand Surrey Canal. The canal was opened in this area in 1807 as a result of the Grand Surrey Canal Act, a major government-backed effort to bring connected waterways across Britain for the transport of goods from across the country and from the colonies via nearby London Docklands. A prerequisite for the industrial overhaul of London’s inner-suburbs, the canal was established during a time when the majority of the capital south-side of the Thames was verdant and agrarian. In fact, early ordnance survey maps from 1821 show the site being occupied by a ‘Cold Blow Farm’ and surrounded by large bodies of water or ‘ponds’ which fed into the canal. A church, St Mary’s Mission also stood on the site, later including a boarding school and allegedly, a pub.
By 1986 the Bermondsey Triangle was labelled as the ‘Silwood Triangle’, a mysterious nod to its future use as an industrial nightclub hotspot. In Kris and Nina Hollington’s tourist book ‘Criminal London’ they refer to bone boiling in the section on South London as ‘Gravediggers worked in Lambeth, excavating bodies for ‘candles of the fat, bonemeal, and dog’s meat’. Perhaps this research unearths a more complicated, darker, or even horrific past to the Bermondsey Triangle.
The Bermondsey Triangle encapsulates the historic Silwood Triangle along with the adjacent Excelsior Works, Timber Wharf, and the northern sector of the Old Kent Road. It appears top-down geometry is important here. As topological law suggests, despite how you stretch, rotate, and twist, what begins as a triangle is always a triangle. The late 19th century saw the development of Victorian terraces and warehouses of which were largely destroyed during heavy WW2 bombing due to the location’s strategic links to trade, food, culture, and fuel from the colonies. Street naming convention in the triangle points to the canal’s original trade routes with the nearby Stockholm Road, Senegal Road, with the trajectory eventually turning skyward with Mercury Way, Orion Business Centre, which houses Venue MOT, and the nearby Gemini Industrial Estate.
Upon visiting the London Metropolitan Archives for early maps of the Bermondsey Triangle, I encountered Charles Booth’s map showing ‘houses licensed for the sale of intoxicating drinks’ produced between 1899 and 1990. In the lowest-right corner of the map shows a small red cross signifying the site of a pub directly atop the area which is now home to Venue MOT and Avalon Café. However due to inaccuracies of late 19th century mapping, and major shifts in density within urban areas, the map refers to the ‘Rose of Kent’ pub on Trundleys Road which closed in 2001 and is unfortunately situated a half mile walk away from the Bermondsey Triangle. Research into local forums found this fascinating local history of homeless man ‘Dog End Bill’ who slept in front of the Rose of Kent for many years during the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps one of the Bermondsey Triangle’s earliest outsiders.
Perhaps the first identified folk-rave space, Warren’s work here is a useful case-study in making the case for a new methodology, a way of seeing a highly potent, DIY club culture taking place across the UK and beyond.
During my excitement for the potential discovery of a Victorian pub on the site of Venue MOT, I sent venue owner Jan Mohammed a snapshot of the map via WhatsApp, stating that it appears the Bermondsey Triangle has always housed venues for celebration’ to which he replied, ‘houses of intoxication, that's us all over, amazing’.
Today sees two newly proposed railway stations encircling the triangle, with an overground station to the north named ‘Surrey Canal’, not to be confused with the nearby ‘Surrey Quays’ overground station, although early efforts to build the site were thwarted in 2010 due to budgetary restraints. Near to Ormside Projects lies another proposed extension of the London Underground Bakerloo line, with a new station to be named ‘Asylum’ in reference to what was nearby Peckham’s, ‘Peckham House’ a 19th century private asylum spanning over 7 acres of what is now Queens Road Peckham and the Old Kent Road.
During the 20th century, two important canal side factories celebrated the fruits of the colonies within the Bermondsey Triangle, and of significant interest to this research are the ‘Mazawattee Tea Company’, which produced chocolate and cocoa from 1901 to 1955.
Further down the canal and along the southern perimeter of the Bermondsey Triangle, in Excelsior works stood the ‘The British Homophone’ factory, which in the 1960s was pressing some of the earliest Caribbean records of Ska, early reggae Calypso, and soul in London. Forever preserving some of the rarest sounds to emerge across the Atlantic and distributing them canal-side, passing barges full of tea and cocoa. A survey by the London Borough of Lewisham states that the site was eventually cleared in 1974 following the decommissioning of the canal, and a slow and painful decline since the 1940s due to increasing efficiencies with heavy goods road transport.
Playing fields known as ‘Senegal Fields’ emerged on the site, before becoming the new home for nearby Millwall Football Club in their hunt for a new ‘den’. Millwall still stands on the site today and is an encroaching giant over Venue MOT within the Orion Business Centre. During the 1980s, the Surrey Canal Road was transformed into a road-going light industrial district largely due to the low cost of the local land, with many of the buildings being split into smaller industrial units. This move saw a general shift in the 1990s from timber yards and builders merchants to car mechanics, the print industry and light engineering, which continues through until the mid 2010s when a general rise in property prices in the area leads local artists and Goldsmith’s University graduates to seek affordable communal living spaces and studios within the inner-London belt or Transport for London’s Zones 1 and 2. Derelict warehouses and unloved yards such as Excelsior Works and South Studios began to capture a spill-over of artists from the Deptford and Peckham communities, with word of mouth connecting wider national pockets of creatives into the Bermondsey Triangle. In 2019, the South Bermondsey Art Trail was founded, marking an established community of creatives permanently based in the triangle.
Setting the scene for methods of interpreting DIY underground club spaces, writer Emma Warren’s experiences of an underground East London space looks at similar historic contexts to those here, particularly the historical proximity to colonial routes and the use of traditionally untrained crew. Uncanny similarities with the venue including its history as artists’ studios, Total Refreshment Centre by description could be based in the Bermondsey Triangle. Perhaps the first identified folk-rave space, Warren’s work here is a useful case-study in making the case for a new methodology, a way of seeing a highly potent, DIY club culture taking place across the UK and beyond. Her research is published as a book and a self-recorded DIY podcast downloadable on the grassroots music platform Bandcamp.
Casting a lens on an emerging new kind of partying as a result of the post-pandemic world, PhD candidate Ben Assister’s paper, ‘From Dancefloors to Tables’ describes the slow openings of nightclubs as a sort of catalyst for gentrification, having a particularly detrimental effect on high-intensity underground nightclubs encouraging the venues to move toward a lounge like experience in antithesis to their community and culture, stating these moves ‘constitute an acceleration of longer-term tendencies toward temporary urbanism and the interrelated gentrification of the city’s nightlife spaces’. Although Assister’s work focuses on similarly occupied spaces within East London such as The Cause, much smaller intricate venue structures, equally important to the ecosystem such as Venue MOT and the Bermondsey Triangle are omitted.
On the pandemic, it is worth mentioning a form of rave gathering known as 'the sesh’ which became particularly synonymous with the COVID-19 lockdown. Referring to 'the session', a term often used within drinking and beer connoisseur culture, the sesh can arguably take place with two or more people and in 2023 is widely considered a pacing exercise as part of the pre, intermediary and certainly the post-rave experience as part of a night out, with its peak culminating as a 'sesh marathon'. Ultimately a collective tug-of-war of excess and restraint, the aim of the sesh is to extend the party for as long as is psychically and economically possible, and is a culture synonymous amongst DJ's and those involved with the electronic dance music scene as a whole. A sesh marathon refers to an occasion where the participants consume a large amount of alcohol and drugs namely ecstasy, cocaine, speed and ketamine for consecutive days at a time. This phenomenon of course has its issues, but certainly is worth mentioning as an impactful ritual on electronic music and club cultures.
Activities during 'the sesh' include clubbing, smoking, drinking DJing or mixing, dancing, talking, performing or just 'chilling' in front of a pre-recorded DJ set.
In the book ‘Pop pagans: paganism and popular music’, academics at Durham University, Weston, D. and Bennett, A. refer to the politicisation of popular music, and a sense of ownership around what folk-music must and mustn’t be; ‘both the left and the right have tried to claim folk music, with the left utilising it as the authentic voice of the working class and the right as the voice of the folk, of tradition and of the imagined past’.
Folklorist Ben Amos argues that modern definitions on folklore require ‘initial context to belong to the same reference group, one composed of people of the same age or of the same professional, local, religious, or ethnic affiliation’. Amos argues that the definition of folklore in its context depends on actual modes of communication and not necessarily on the particular cultural concept of them. It is through these basic concepts that I analyse the folkloric impact of the Bermondsey Triangle. Amos adds, ‘folklore is one of these three: a body of knowledge, a mode of thought, or a kind of art.’
On the topic of folkloric classification of rave culture, in the PhD thesis ‘Folklore and Alternative Masculinities in a Rave Scene’, Avery comments on the socially transformative abilities of the ‘vernacular ecstatic trance dance’ in a way that can transcend conservative beliefs around masculinity. Although Avery’s research is certainly of interest, for the purpose of this research I am particularly focussed on his approach to the justification for rave culture within traditional folklore. Akin to Ben Amos’ term ‘towards a definition’, Avery isolates and compares the singular elements of rave culture to traditional classifications outlined by folklorists Barre Toelken and Victor Turner including ritual, dance, liminality, and mind-altering sensation. Like many academic papers, Avery discusses the concept of the DJ as shamanism, which is a link I find particularly tenuous and is addressed further into this research.
BBC Radio 4 presenter Martin Green descends to the hills during the early hours to draw parallels between his youth spent Morris dancing and his later days raving on the same hill, as an attempt to unearth the similarities in these rituals and to discover an overarching commonality for why we dance at dawn. An ethno-musicology study-cum-radio show, Green compares ‘the rhythms of staying up late, the rhythms of May’ whilst partaking in two seemingly very different types of folkloric dances on the same hill at dawn.
In his section, ‘Beating the Retreat’, folklorist Michael Brocken describes the folk club and it’s resistance to change, a socio-political immunity that serves as a retreat from daily life, ‘an antiquarian folk ruling class who seek refuge in an intellectualised echelon of antiquarian connoisseurs’. Brocken argues that folk clubs provide protected ‘worlds’ of which provide a retreat from contemporary socio-political economic strife, and act as a gatekeeping structure for further progression of the study of folklore.