Dalston Superstore

Start with the number, because it's the only way this place reads correctly.

Between 2006 and 2016, London lost 58 per cent of its LGBTQ+ venues — from around 125 down to 53. That figure comes out of the UCL Urban Laboratory research led by Ben Campkin and Lo Marshall, which has been mapping London's queer nightlife since 1986 and published its night-venues report in 2017. The reasons weren't mysterious or cultural. The single biggest cause was conversion into straight venues. The second was demolition for redevelopment. Rent hikes did the rest.

Dalston Superstore opened in 2009 — which is to say, it opened directly into that decade, and is still here.

That's the context for what otherwise looks like an ordinary two-floor bar on Kingsland High Street. Upstairs is a room that functions in daylight: food, coffee, people working, weekend drag brunches. Downstairs is a low basement that functions in the dark and gets properly sweaty, which is the actual venue. The split matters more than it sounds, because a queer space that only exists after 11pm is a queer space that's easy to close. One that's also a café at noon is embedded in a street in a way a club isn't.

The programming is the other half of it. Resident Advisor keeps it in its London clubs guide, and it earns that by booking emerging queer DJs and drag performers rather than buying in names with existing draw. That's a harder, less profitable way to run a room, and it's the reason the place functions as infrastructure — somewhere a performer can get an early booking — rather than as a venue that merely hosts queer nights. Time Out marked its fifteenth birthday in 2024, which in this category is a genuinely unusual anniversary.

There's a version of this write-up that calls the place an institution and stops there. Worth resisting, because "institution" is what gets said about venues after they've stopped taking risks, and the thing keeping this one interesting is that its booking policy still costs it money. A room that only ever books the safe act is a room that has quietly become a business with a rainbow flag on it.

Now the honest part, because a place this beloved gets written about badly.

It is small, and it is popular, and those two facts collide every weekend. The basement holds what a basement holds. Expect a queue, expect it to be hot, and expect the downstairs to be a different proposition at 1am than the upstairs was at 8pm — that's the design, not a fault, but it does mean "let's go to Superstore" describes two quite different nights depending on when you say it.

And Dalston itself has changed underneath it. The strip Superstore opened onto in 2009 is not the strip that's there now, and a venue surviving gentrification is not the same as a neighbourhood surviving it. Being the one that didn't close is a real achievement and also a slightly grim distinction — it means most of the others did.

Go on a weeknight if you want the room rather than the crush, or commit properly to a weekend and accept the queue as part of the transaction. Either way it's a five-minute walk from Dalston Kingsland and Dalston Junction, so the Overground gets you out at the end of the night without a fight — which, for anyone weighing whether a night in east London is worth the journey home, is not a small thing.

If you're stringing an east London evening together rather than going to one address, Boxpark Shoreditch is south of here and loud in a completely different, much less specific way — useful for eating before, less so for the actual night.