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Empty disco floor, mirrored ball overhead, speakers in the dark, no people. Photo: Yerutskow, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Empty floor at Diskothek A65, 10 July 2011. Yerutskow / CC BY-SA 3.0.

SCENE

Radial Wants the Midsize Room

Tottenham’s new 250-cap listening club opens out of Ten87 Studios with a Whitaker-tuned Martin Audio/Funktion-One rig, a no-phones floor, and an opening weekend that stacks jungle, UK bass, house and garage. The gossip is the sound. The story is the room.

format
Scene Report
volume
10
date
Oct 17, 2026
author
CJ Archer
places
London, Tottenham
words
1,014 words · 5 min
photo
Photo: Yerutskow

There is a particular kind of London night that only works when the room is the right size. Not a warehouse you get lost in. Not a booth so tight you can smell the DJ’s perfume over the kick. Somewhere in the middle, where the bass finds your sternum and the stranger next to you still has a face. Radial, the new club and arts space on Markfield Road in Tottenham, is betting everything on that middle.

It opened the first weekend of September out of Ten87 Studios, the independent recording community nesting in Tottenham since 2014. The address will ring a bell if you used to ghost around Five Miles, or if you caught the listening-bar years when MOKO held the same plot. Radial takes that shell and turns it into a 250-capacity performance room (about 80 if everyone actually sits), designed less like a content farm and more like a place you came to hear something. Japanese-style loungers line the walls. There is a separate bar with its own speakers so the round does not cost you the drop. Phones stay down. Photography stays out. The house line is simple: music performance should be enjoyed in the moment.

That sounds like branding until you clock who tuned the room.

The custom 10-point Martin Audio/Funktion-One rig was built with Nick Whitaker, the acoustic consultant Rob Burn (Ten87 co-founder) calls a mate, and who Burn credits with work on Plastic People on Curtain Road in Shoreditch. If you were young and hungry in London in those years, Plastic People on Curtain Road was the reference tone. The kind of room people still argue about over chips at the afters. Whitaker and design studio SODA pushed panelling, absorption and diffusion into the walls and ceiling so the translation stays even across the floor. Burn told Broadsheet the goal was a “very special listening experience.” In Night Shift terms: they spent the money where your body notices it, not where the story grid does.

Burn and co-founder Romy Quinnen did not invent the midsize-room argument. They are just saying it out loud while those rooms keep disappearing. “In recent years we’ve seen too many small/medium venues close,” Burn told Broadsheet. “These spaces are essential; they are where scenes and genres are born.” Quinnen, who is also a recording artist, put it the same way to local press: smaller venues are essential to London’s musical ecosystem, and the closures have been hard to watch. Radial is their answer, part-funded through Arts Council England’s Supporting Grassroots Music scheme, and grown out of the studio network rather than dropped in from a hospitality deck.

That studio story matters if you care how scenes actually form. Ten87 runs dozens of recording spaces across Tottenham (press puts the figure north of fifty, sometimes sixty) and talks about a rotating circle of roughly two hundred artists, creators and producers who use them. Neighbours become collaborators. The venue was always meant to open that private ecosystem onto the street. Fontaines D.C., Wolf Alice, Sherelle and Mount Kimbie have passed through the studios. Radial is the live stage that was supposed to sit beside that work. When the previous venue on the site closed, Burn said it left a big void. Bringing it back was the next step, and a way to build on Tottenham’s cultural legacy rather than treat N15 as a layover between better postcodes.

The opening weekend told you what kind of floor they want. Friday brought Situation Dance, Femi Koleoso’s (Ezra Collective) inclusive dancing series that started at Moko in 2023. Saturday ran a six-DJ bill headed by Elena Colombi, the Italian-born, London-based NTS resident whose sets slide between jungle, post-punk, cosmic psychedelia, industrial and spoken word, joined by Serenda, Shivum Sharma, drysu, LO-LOW and Eula. Sunday stretched into a twelve-hour session across UK bass, techno, house and garage, with Mixtress, L-Vis 1990, Dean Bryce, Sooyeon, MJK, Klose One, Cicely, Karlie Marx and a secret guest. A six-DJ Saturday and a twelve-hour Sunday, in a room of 250, is a bill for records that need a body count under three hundred.

SODA’s design borrows a circular motif from Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, the Tate Modern sun that made strangers share a floor without a VIP rope. The lighting leans warm. What you wear is still your business. What Radial is offering is attention: a licence to 3am on Fridays and Saturdays, earlier through the week, and a programme that puts club nights beside listening events, talks, workshops and artist-led experiments. Under-represented promoters and burgeoning genres get named as priorities. Whether that holds after the opening glow is the only review that counts, and the regulars will write it.

What makes Radial worth the gossip is not that London got another club. London gets clubs. What makes it worth the gossip is the bet underneath: that the midsize room still matters, that sound-system pedigree can still be a reason to cross the river or stay north, and that a studio community can grow a public floor without sanding off the local grain. Burn’s line about scenes being born in small and medium rooms is infrastructure talk dressed as feeling. Plastic People’s ghost lives in that talk. Five Miles and MOKO do too. Radial is the new name on the same Markfield Road door, asking you to put the phone away and find out whether the middle of the room still holds.

Radial opened the first weekend of September on Markfield Road, 250 capacity, phones down, a Martin Audio/Funktion-One rig tuned with the person Burn credits on Plastic People. If the afters conversation this autumn keeps landing on Tottenham, it will be because of that room.

Sources

They Settled It at Afterhours Signals From the Heart of the Rave Vol. 10

CJ Archer