“We’re Going Full Force and Hell for Leather”: Stuart Glen on the Future of The Cause
Words by Christina Dean
Few things are constant in a city that’s in flux as much as London, something that Stuart Glen, Eugene Wild and The Cause crew know all too well.
After opening the original iteration of The Cause in 2018 at Ashley House in Tottenham, and throwing some pretty legendary parties with the likes of Adonis, Keep Hush, Derrick Carter, Boiler Room, Bicep, Four Tet, The Blessed Madonna, and Jamie xx, the redevelopment of the area meant they had to vacate the site in 2022. The search for a new home led them to 60 Dock Road, across the dock from the Excel and close to City Airport, where they did a series of pop-up shows before growing into the space on a permanent basis. Well as permanent as is possible in a meanwhile site, a precariousness that Stuart has embraced: “It lasts as long as it lasts. We like to take punts and risks and stuff and our educated guess is we’re going to get another summer or two out of it, or maybe more. So we’re going full force and hell for leather. As long as we’re getting away with it, we’re getting away with it.”
Despite being in the game for over eight years with The Cause, during which time he’s grown the organisation from one to five venues as well as navigate multiple relocations, the industry is still throwing him curveballs.
The newest member of The Cause family is Vittoria Wharf, an old industrial warehouse loft in Hackney Wick that’s now a 200-capacity club and arts space, coincidentally above the space where Stuart cut his teeth throwing warehouse parties about ten years ago. It’s only been open a number of weeks but there have been teething problems. “We’ve just had a few issues of licensing, so we’ve only got a license till 1am apart from temporary events notices, which makes it a little bit tricky,” explains Stuart. “We went to go for a three o’clock license. We had a couple of nosy neighbours that got annoyed with us. So they basically put in representations, and the council didn’t agree our late license, which is pretty important for us to be honest.” It appears that the handful of complaints about noise were made during times that the venue wasn’t open, so it’s probable that an illegal party in or around one of the area’s warehouses was to blame. “We got someone else’s stick on it, but we shall fight it and live another day,” he says, with a resubmission to the council now on the cards.
Sadly it’s becoming an all-too-familiar tale. According to the Music Venue Trust, ‘operational issues’, like noise complaints, were behind more than a fifth of the 148 venue closures in 2023. Night & Day in Manchester’s Northern Quarter got embroiled in a noise row for three years after the council served notice in 2021 following complaints of loud noise by residents in a neighbouring flat. In 2022, The Compton Arms had a review on its licence after four neighbours complained about noise, and Blondie’s Brewery in Leyton had the same happen just this spring. Hackney’s MOTH Club revealed it was under threat at the end of last year after developers put in plans to build new flats that would back onto the part of the building where the venue’s stage is situated and have balconies overlooking the smoking area, which programmer Keith Miller said would ultimately lead to noise complaints. The Londoner has mapped out all the pubs in the city dealing with noise complaints, including the Sekforde in Clerkenwell, showing how single individuals, with often trivial grievances, can bring a venue to its knees.
“It’s pretty hard for venues to operate at a profitable level I’d say at the moment. If we didn’t have our outdoor space, I wouldn’t be in this”
Through the establishment of a new nightlife taskforce and the granting of additional powers to overturn licensing decisions made by local councils, Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan looks to be trying to address some of the issues that venues are facing. But is it enough? It’s a resounding no from Stuart.
“I think that the major thing they’ve got to do is really look at the balance of what venues provide compared to the negatives, and look at the positives. Because, for example, we sometimes have like 50/60 bartenders on, we’ve got like four or five sound engineers on, managers, supervisors. We’ll have like 30/40 security on a show, so it’s quite possible that for any show, we have 100 people working on site specifically, and that’s not even the DJs or the artists, or the managers or the promoters and the people that work for the promoters,” he explains. “So there’s a huge ecosystem, and there’s so much that comes from that. It supports a lot of work, a lot of jobs, and there’s a hell of a lot of tax that gets paid from it, VAT and corporation tax.”
Even though he runs his operations properly and safely, there is always a feeling of being at risk, that the complaints of a tiny minority can outweigh huge benefits like “thousands of people coming in on a weekend having a good time, £30/£40,000 in VAT paid a week… it just seems insane”. For him, the powers that be should “really try and look after the good operators and fight their side.”
Licensing-adjacent issues are one thing but it’s the economy providing the killer blows to operators and venues. Not only have the spending habits of customers changed as living costs have risen, the impact is being felt on the other end with staffing, rent, rates and electricity costs all going up. “It’s pretty hard for venues to operate at a profitable level I’d say at the moment. If we didn’t have our outdoor space, I wouldn’t be in this, I’d do something else, because it wouldn’t work for us financially,” he says. This is not a situation unique to Stuart as owners across the board are feeling the same pinch, but running a club like The Cause does come with its own specific set of challenges, making it a more volatile business. “We’ve concentrated on building a really cool, very decent club that’s different to everywhere else. It’s DIY. It’s got a good aesthetic. The sound is good in all the rooms, and the atmosphere is a bit different to everywhere else you go in London,” Stuart explains, but it’s also “purely event led. It’s a destination, it has to be a good attraction to get people there in numbers because of where it is. You’re asking people to go to pretty much an empty warehouse, you know, not really near much other nightlife.”
The club remains the core of the operation but Stuart has had to diversify his revenue streams to help spread that risk. All My Friends, the bar and record store in Hackney Wick, which was the first additional venue he opened, happened “because, in all honesty, we were desperate to have any sort of revenue making business and a stream that would keep the organisation alive. Because when we left Tottenham, we didn’t have anything else sorted, and we were just trying to get a pub going, a bar, whatever, so we could keep money coming in and paying our overheads and our team, because once we didn’t have the team, then we wouldn’t have been able to reboot anywhere we managed to get the site.”
“We’ve concentrated on building a really cool, very decent club that’s different to everywhere else. It’s DIY. It’s got a good aesthetic.”
Other sites also mean more opportunities to engage an audience. Stuart explains that All My Friends was designed as a hangout for the clubbers when they don’t want the commitment of a big night out until 6am, just somewhere to eat, drink and listen to some good music. “You get, like, waves of people coming to the club. I’m now 45 and a lot of my mates don’t actually come anymore, or they come for the big shows. They’re more likely to go to some of our bars or want to eat some good food. It’s kind of a bit cyclical, so it’s just engaging the audiences as they kind of grow through their different social patterns, really.”
Now the group also runs Peckham pub The Greyhound, which is making a name for itself with killer residencies (first was Natty Can Cook, now there’s Patio Pizza in the kitchen); Dalston restaurant, cocktail and hi-fi bar The Marquee Moon, with an East Asian twist on pub classics; and the intimate club space Vittoria Wharf.
Though the expansion of the group has been “about building a much stronger force that we could then use to bounce off each other to create more of a cultural impact across the city.” Stuart’s quick to say that he’s stopping there for the foreseeable, partly to lower his blood pressure and mainly because the climate is so risky. “We just basically want to concentrate on what we got, fine tune everything, really tweak everything, make it work as well as possible, and continue putting on as many good shows to as many different audiences as possible.”
See the latest events happening at The Cause here.
