'We don't stop until the music does': Inside Fold, London's newest 24-hour nightclub

At Fold, London’s newest nightclub, something special happens around midday. After a night – and subsequent morning – of raving in the dark, the stage lighting is switched off and the window shutters opened. Light from the afternoon sun streams in, bathing everyone inside in an amber glow.

“It’s beautiful,” Lasha Jorjoliani, the club’s co-founder, tells the Standard when we meet him and the other founder, Seb Glover, in a back room at the venue. “All you can see is smiling faces and literally everybody is on a positive note.”

Moments like these are made possible thanks to Fold’s 24-hour license. The club, which opened in August, is sat on an industrial estate in Canning Town. The building itself is a former printing factory, so it already had excellent soundproofing — a good thing, too, seeing as the sound system inside blasts out noise at 110db, louder than any other club in London.

“We don’t stop until the music stops,” Jorjoliani, who also DJs under the moniker Voicedrone, says. “We can carry on until we think we should. That’s what we’re slowly getting to people. We’re not closing at 6am, 7am or 8am — we’re closing whenever the music stops.”

It’s these kinds of sprawling parties that, as a result of London’s ever-tightening licensing laws, are rarely found anywhere else in the city.

“With the shorter parties that London is used to, [people are] going out and just getting absolutely annihilated,” Glover explains. “But here you have the time to grow into the party. And then, around 9am or midday, suddenly this new energy comes through and there’s this connection between people.”

The search to find a space in which the pair could emulate this vision took them through two years of dead ends before, in the autumn of 2017, Glover found something.

“Seb called me one day and he was like: ‘You should come and see this place',” Jorjoliani recalls. “We walked in and it was a completely abandoned space, there was nothing, just rubbish. We were like: ‘Ok, we’ve got this idea’. When we look at it now it looks exactly how we imagined it when we first walked in.”

“We took a lot of risk as well,” Glover adds, “because we did it before we had a license. We did research, obviously, before we started but we got this license maybe six months after actually being here.

“We were confident we would get it. We would have been a bit screwed if we hadn’t,” he laughs.

All of the work transforming the derelict building into a functioning venue was done by Jorjoliani and Glover without the help of outside contractors, meaning the place still has an industrial, rudimentary feel to it. The building has no signage to indicate it’s a nightclub, the interior design is bare and, from the smokers’ terrace, all you can see is piles of rubble.

It helps to make the club feel detached from the rest of London, somewhere clubbers can take refuge and lose themselves in the music without worry of prying eyes.

“It does feel more free-flowing here compared to other places in London,” Glover says. “Of course we run a tight ship, and we’ve had a fantastic record since we’ve opened in terms of wellbeing, safety and security. But it does just feel more relaxed once you’re inside — I don’t know whether it’s the extended hours that does that, or the safe space policy, but people feel like they can breathe and relax.”

The term “safe space” is an ill-defined one, but in many ways it does seem a fitting description for somewhere like Fold, especially as the club is actively trying to foster an atmosphere of inclusivity — there are signs stuck to the wall reminding people to treat others with respect and a policy of no cameras on the dancefloor is encouraged.

“It’s difficult to implement when people are used to defending things when they go out,” Jorjoliani says, “and even now we get 10 to 15 people removing the stickers [placed on their phone cameras by door staff] and taking pictures. But, slowly, people are starting to tell fellow punters: ‘Ok, you can stop taking pictures'."

The crowds at Fold are noticeably more diverse than in many other London clubs, and the place enjoys a high retention rate — according to Glover, despite being open for just three months, around one in five clubbers are already becoming regulars.

That could be a testament of the strong programme so far, with Egyptian Lover, Radioactive Man and DMX Krew stopping by to deliver excellent sets. Booking DJs hasn’t been without its challenges, though.

“The size of the club we have, it can be quite tough,” Glover says. “[The club has a] 500 capacity, we can’t compete with the likes of Printworks. They’re just booking up all the headliners, even the mid-range artists, so their fees go up.

“We’re not anti that, but we’ve also got our niche, we occupy this space — we’re doing our own thing in an intimate setting. It’s what London is missing.”

So where next for Fold? There are plans to open up a second room, develop a label, start a radio station and continue running the five studios currently on site, in which artists can mix, master and produce music.

The club’s future also seems linked to the development of Canning Town, which, as Glover puts it, “feels like Hackney Wick before it all kicked off — five, 10 years ago”. It’s an area ripe for gentrification, with (relatively) low property prices and the promise of both 24-hour DLR links and the Elizabeth line running through nearby Stratford within the next couple of years.

“There was a real scene in Hackney Wick which seems to be migrating towards Canning Town,” says Glover, who previously ran the now-closed club Shapes in E9. “We don’t want this to turn into Hackney Wick, we don’t want to be a purveyor of gentrification. We like that we’re hidden away a little bit, so you can come here for a reason, not just passing by.”

Whatever the future holds for Fold, right now it feels like a refreshed approach to clubbing in London. Go, and don’t leave before those shutters get opened.