Dalston’s super store
Dalston Superstore's daytime fare
It’s true there’s been a lot of press around Dalston’s claims for Shoreditch’s fallen crown, and anyone returning to the area after a long hiatus will notice the striking shift in demographic on the Kingsland Road, particularly around midnight on a weekend.
This change has primarily been brought about by the Dalston Superstore – counter to expectations for a new bar operated on a shoestring, in the middle of a recession.
Matt Tucker and Dan Beaumont opened Dalston Superstore, their first business venture together, on the Kingsland Road in early May, sandwiched between a Turkish café and a bookie’s.
The success of the Superstore lies in Dan and Matt’s savvy eye for spotting a scene to be tapped, as they’ve done before with established clubnights Disco Bloodbath and Trailer Trash respectively.
This time they’ve been the first to take action over Dalston’s lack of bar space for its burgeoning creative scene and the gay intelligentsia moving up from Shoreditch in an effort to escape highstreet hipster bars and expensive over-styled boozeries.
Since then, word of the Superstore has spread from a single Facebook event page, all the way to the pages of Grazia.
“We both grew up around the explosion of Shoreditch,” says Dan, “and we saw that area grow and become an interesting exciting creative hub, with lots of interesting places where you could count on meeting interesting people. But we’ve seen that area decline into quite a homogenous, mass market, binge drinking area that a lot of our friends don’t go to anymore.”
This decline got them thinking about accommodating those that had been displaced: both wanted to be involved in a venue that brought back to life that interesting creative scene, and so 18 months ago they started looking for a venue.
“We found that lots of different circles of friends had gravitated to Dalston. We’d been looking for venues for a long time, and when we found this place everything just seemed to click; it’s an interesting time to be around here,” says Dan.
Despite being a catalyst for the hype, Dan and Matt are also aware that a couple of months of being namedropped is not enough to make the Superstore last.
“It’s easy to get caught up in the press,” says Matt. “One minute it’s the hottest place to go, and the next year it’s not, so we’ve tried to distance ourselves a little bit from all this and concentrate on what we’re doing. We’re quite confident what we do is individual and different enough, and yet if anything the area is going to continue to get busier over the next few years.”
The venue they found now has an overall capacity of just 200, open from 11 or 12 until 2am, but previous to this had been derelict for two years – the basement was infested with rats, and the inside was barely a shell of a building. This however, meant that they could start from scratch.
“The whole project has been on a shoestring,” says Matt. “But this means we’ve had to be a lot more creative. Something we feel is missing from other places is the responsibility to the local community to be somewhere lots of different people can use in lots of different ways. We both liked the idea of the bar being the kind of, the hub, or focal point of a specific community.
“One of the things we wanted to do was to bring a European sensibility to the venue. In places like Berlin, a space functions as an art space, as a café, as a bar – but you don’t really get that so much in London – everything is pigeon-holed.
“That’s not something that we wanted to happen, so it’s a gallery with art launches every month, a café in the day, as well as being a bar and clubspace, and there’s no reason all those things can’t coexist.”
Their predominantly Turkish neighbours have been friendly and supportive of the venture, as it has increased footfall and overspill has built business for nearby late night venues and restaurants.
“We keep things local as much as possible,” says Dan. “We employ people from Hackney, and all the artists we exhibit live in Hackney, with the space curated by local artist Alex Noble. At the end of the day, everyone’s much better off having something like this than just a derelict space.”
The Superstore caters primarily towards the alternative gay community, specifically, those who feel bored, alienated, or patronised by much of the gay scene in London.
“We both have backgrounds being involved in the London gay community, through Disco Bloodbath and Trailer Trash, but we felt that there was a need for something like us in the area,” says Dan.
“We wanted to be a gay bar, but we also want to offer good quality drinks and interesting music, without any patronising bubblegum pop or nauseating funky house. We’re not a gay bar in the traditional sense and we have a very mixed clientele, but our main target audience is the local gay community.
“Although there’s a general perception that we’re out of the woods in terms of homophobia and hate crime, sometimes the facts don’t really bear that out, especially in Hackney. There have been quite a lot of high profile incidents recently – the stabbing around the George and Dragon (on Hackney Road) for example, and a couple of others.
“So as well as wanting to run a gay venue, we also wanted to offer the local gay community a safe place that was predominantly theirs.”
As yet though, the project is still evolving, albeit successfully enough for the clientele to be spilling onto the street come Friday night.
Matt says that the space will continue to be a work in progress, but that he likes this, as it’s meant that as the space is used, it can grow with its clientele.
“We’ve seen how people use the space,” says Dan, “and the idea is to keep on tweaking it. I don’t think we’ll ever get to the point of finishing it, because there’s always going to be more to do, but I think we owe it to our customers to constantly make an effort with the space for them. We were fortunate to have a lot of goodwill when we opened. But now our part of the bargain is to carry on making it better and better.”
For event information, head to Dalston Superstore’s Facebook page.