Come out of Tottenham Court Road station today and you’ll find a very different vista to the strange mix of knock-off luggage shops, internet cafés and bureaux de change that lined Charing Cross Road 15 years ago. The area immediately to the east of the station, St. Giles, was until relatively recently one of the centres of London’s murky, creative underworld.
What began as a leper colony had, as the 18th century rolled around, turned into one of the country’s worst slums, the Rookery. Here, sewers flowed openly through the streets into people’s houses, rubbish piled up on every corner and disease and dolor were rife among the overcrowded masses.
By the time the Second World War ended, the area had cleaned up its act (sort of), becoming the centre of England’s music industry. You couldn’t move on Denmark Street in the 1960s without bumping into a wide-eyed songwriter with a propensity for underage girls, and as such the area became very, very hip.
But any cool was washed away in the 2000s by the greenlighting of both Crossrail and Central St. Giles, the primary-coloured colossus designed by Renzo ‘Player’ Piano and the now-headquarters of the primary-coloured colossus Google. Despite this, St. Giles High Street, and all its strange hairdressers, Korean restaurants, and LGBTQ+ cafés, clung on. And then came Outernet.
The jewel in the crown of Consolidated Developments, Laurence Kirschel’s property company, Outernet is the new £1 billion entertainment district in the heart of St. Giles. It comprises two live music venues, a series of bars, restaurants and pop-ups, a hotel, Chateau Denmark, and the customary New London ‘immersive media space’. Kirschel has long had his fingers in the sticky central London pie, having been a former business partner of Paul Raymond, the one-time King of Soho.
But Outernet, and the complete recalibration of nightlife in the capital’s core, has been Kirschel’s white whale for some time, since he began buying up property in the area in the 1990s with a view to its creation. Does Outernet spell the end of carefree carousing in central? Is this the future of going out-out in London? Safe, curated nightlife for safe, curated lifestyles: Instagrammable, expensive and almost certainly ending at 2am. I knew a trip there would tell me something about boozing in the heart of the capital and so, just like in Barking, Parliament and Purfleet, I gathered a small crack team of The Fence’s shadiest sots and set out about on a journey to the outer reaches of pisstaking and sobriety.
We met on a Friday at the top of Tottenham Court Road’s escalators, in front of Outernet’s public-facing pièce de résistance: the Now Building. As meeting points go, it’s hard to miss: four storeys high and with a façade, a black-and-gold version of that boring modern vernacular, this Kaaba of consumerism features about a bazillion LED screens, all connected, brightly lit and pumping out a steady stream of impressive visuals. It’s gigantic, it’s gaudy, it’s Nusr-Et meets Barking Riverside meets Times Square.
The screens were showing The Spaces Inbetween, an ‘interactive body movement artwork’ from immersive studio Pixel Network and the artist Rupert Newman, which consists of teenage stoner visuals that move about the panels in front of you based upon your own movements. The screens also, however, show adverts. Or rather, ‘multi-sensory experiences that evolve the nature of experiential advertising’, as Outernet’s website wordily puts it.
