Séancing the rave: subcultural spectres and real estate in King’s Cross, London

A place is a conjunction of many histories and many spaces, yet much of its identity will depend upon how and what histories are told of it. The story of King’s Cross, London, is today perhaps most loudly told by Argent, the developers and managers of the area’s regeneration project. Their retelling weaves narratives of urban decay and wasted land into a tale of salvation, delivered in the form of a £3 billion funded privately owned public space, with luxury shops, restaurants, and tech headquarters, and elite art colleges, such as Central Saint Martins, as tenants.

Prior to the redevelopment, with its abandoned industrial spaces, King’s Cross was also once a haven for both licensed and illegal raves. Today, the property developers choose to “séance” aspects of this history, reviving images and notions of rave culture within their placemaking programming to heighten the area’s cultural cachet. While ostensibly an act of preserving local cultural heritage, Argent’s position in telling these histories is contentious given that, as the estate’s redeveloper, it actively erased the clubs, practices, and communities from the area.

This paper, drawing from ongoing PhD research, will investigate how club cultures are mined for aesthetic appeal, belying the impact and nuance of these movements while also firmly rooting their dissidence in a safely distant past. Through analysis of permanent installations, events, pop-ups, and press releases this paper will examine how Argent forcibly haunts the area with a curated notion of former club scenes, smoothening and designing these histories as promotional tools and experiences. This paper will further contrast these real estate narratives with other more radical, queer, histories present in the archives, arguing for the potency of alternative histories and hauntings in the face of neoliberal urban erasure.