POLICE CRACKDOWN AS PROPERTY TYCOON MOVES IN
Is this the end of an era?
A party at the Lord Napier pub in Hackney Wick was shut down by police on friday night, leaving scores of ravers stranded outside and a few dozen people locked down within. Once party goer named Micha said "the police just turned up and wouldnt let anyone in, we went off to another party in the end, but the pigs were were fierce with it."
The police have noticeably been paying attention to goings on in the Wick, an area once famed for its parties but now referred to as 'Chelsea Wick' due to the plethora of wealthy students desperate to live in the overpriced warhouses that define the locality. Unsurpisingly, many fingers are being pointed at millionaire property developer David Brady who has brought a portfolio of several former industrial properties in the area in the run up to the olympics in 2012. Having played a massive role in the redevelopment of shoreditch at the turn of the century, Brady recently declared at a council meeting that he intended to repeat his business plan in the Wick, and was welcomed as a saviour by some business elements of the community. And he got to work very quickly indeed, putting a stop to many of the parties going on so that he could make a more attractive pitch to the media companies he now relies on bringing into the area to fill his spaces. With his slogan 'do it anyway', Brady openly intends to capitalise on the autonomous art and music community that sprung up in the area as rents spiralled out of reach in the rest of Hackney. The Napier was once notorious for cheesy psy-trance raves - you know the sort, dreadlocks, dogs on strings, people on K hitting each other with bricks - but was taken over in 2008, had a makeover of music policy and quickly became established as the go-to place for NU-RAVE. Having hosted acts as diverse as Micachu and The Shapes to Metronomy and Joe and Will Ask, the venue is now in its third incarnation after the previous manager Richard Wright was evicted for failure to pay the electricity bill. Sadly, the venue has quickly regained a reputation for doing all the wrong things...and badly. During the Hackney Wick-ed Festival, widely held to be an unmitigated disaster, the venue was resprayed, obtained corporate sponsorship from Red Bull and as one resident put it "went completely shit overnight, the guy is throwing illegal parties in there, then coming out and having a go at you for putting flyers on the walls of 'his' venue". Not many illegal venues would be able to survive with constant police surveillance outside, especially with punters being so forcefully turned away, so it does look to be game over for the Napier, which for such an iconic rave instituion, is a crying shame.
More news as it comes
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