The Lure of the Temporary

I hadn’t been to Printworks, the six thousand-capacity nightclub and events venue in south London, before this month. I doubt I would have been at all if it weren’t facing demolition. I mostly avoid ‘superclubs’, but the knowledge that I soon wouldn’t be able to go, even if I wanted to, made it more appealing. That’s the lure of the temporary.

Earlier this year, the Irish collective Temporary Pleasure took over an empty building in Dublin for six weeks to host more than forty events in collaboration with twelve local organisations. More than a hundred musicians, DJs, dancers, performers and visual artists were involved, and more than seven thousand people attended. The space was set up by fifty participants in a two-week design-and-build workshop, supported by grants and a crowd-funding campaign. The increasing reliance on non-permanent venues, however, may reinforce the notion that what happens at them is expendable.

Over the last three years, the UK’s nightclub industry has seen a fifth of its venues disappear. In Ireland, there are fewer than fifty registered clubs left. For queer spaces, the figures are even more alarming, declining by 58 per cent between 2006 and 2016. Printworks was only ever a temporary space, established in 2017 while the property developers British Land decided what to do with the site. It will be turned into offices next year.

Another mid-redevelopment temporary club, the Cause in Tottenham, shut its doors earlier this year. The project has relocated to the Royal Docks but only for a few months: the mayor of London has described it as a ‘magnet for entrepreneurship’. As developers revamp a disused industrial estate in Manchester, planning permission has been approved for a major warehouse arts centre – but only as a stopgap.

Temporarily transforming vacant inner-city buildings may offer a solution to the closure of cultural venues but it provides little stability for artists. Short-term agreements are often subject to last-minute restrictions and licence changes. Ormside Projects, despite operating since 2015, still relies on temporary notices and only runs events sporadically, contingent on the approval of a committee. Renting nomadically isn’t necessarily cheaper, either: prices have doubled, if not tripled, since the pandemic. Ellie Pennick, the founder of Guts Gallery, became a nomadic dealer in part to reduce costs, but since being quoted upwards of £1000 a day has moved to a permanent space.

Where artists go, the market follows. ‘In recent decades,’ as UN-Habitat says, cities ‘have expressed a growing interest in placing culture at the core of urban development strategies’. In The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), Richard Florida described culture as the ‘key to economic growth’: ‘not just in the ability to attract the creative class but to translate that underlying advantage into creative economic outcomes in the form of new ideas, new high-tech businesses and regional growth’.

But the emphasis on economics, the prioritisation of profit, means a loss of other kinds of value, and a tendency towards homogeneity. I was disappointed by Printworks: the abandoned printing plant could have been any generic post-industrial space.

The best pop-ups don’t only replace more rigid venues and remove barriers to entry, but bring communities together and respond to the needs of local people. They can also be politically directed: in the lead-up to Ireland’s Marriage Equality referendum in 2015, Temporary Pleasure organised a queer performance in a straight nightclub. Increasingly, though, temporariness is a tactic for surviving the precarious city, a way for culture to flourish by attending to the scarcity – and unequal distribution – of space and resources. Still, the seduction of a vacant space lies in its openness.