For those who never really took an interest, Tiger Tiger will be best remembered for its bomb. In a foiled June 2007 terrorist plot, a device was found outside the two-storey nightclub just off Piccadilly Circus. An ambulance crew, attending an incident nearby, discovered a car ventilating smoke, and when they peered inside, found 60 litres of petrol, several gas cylinders, and bags of nails.
Had it been possible to avoid casualties, most clubbers would have considered the bomb’s detonation to be an improvement on London’s nightlife. A rare jihadist PR coup, even.
For a quarter of a century, Tiger Tiger was street furniture, a landmark, a snaking queue that you passed on your way to better places. There but for the grace of God. The line was always a menagerie of people you met on the very worst nights out: underage girls, leery older blokes, confused tourists who had googled ‘nightclub west end’, lubricated call centre workers, oily office managers having their bi-annual fun, big groups of lads about to be ejected by the bouncers for ‘not bringing ladies’.
Any sense that the normal-waged sort might come in from the provinces to have a night in the West End is pretty much over
Inside, Tiger Tiger’s user base communed with the distilled essence of corporate West End. 18,000 square feet, five bars, a Rubik’s Cube-patterned dance floor that reverberated to Fatman Scoop, Jason Derulo and Ed Sheeran and came off on your shoes in a patina of fermenting Fosters and WKD.
‘It’s strange place, this. Doesn’t really seem to have a demographic,’ Oobah Butler reported for VICE in 2016. ‘It’s just a paddock of disparate people. Some dancing, some trying to eat their halloumi skewers in the inexplicable restaurant portion of the club, some just nursing a solitary pint.’
It’s horrifying but unsurprising that in 2021 it became known as ‘the caustic soda tequila place’, after an under-trained barman accidentally served four women industrial cleaner instead of salt with their Jose Cuervo. As of this week, though, it is no more. ‘Tiger Tiger is now closed. Thanks for all the memories’, announced a terse statement on their website.
The end, when it came, was sudden: a DJ who’d been due to play the weekend said he had to read the news online like everyone else. There are apparently plans to turn the Haymarket building, of which Tiger Tiger constitutes a couple of floors, into a 500-bed hotel. What the bomb failed to do, the price of London accommodation has finally achieved.
But while few will mourn it in the specific, it’s perhaps worth mourning Tiger Tiger as an avatar of an era now receding into history. At its zenith, it was more than one club: it was an entertainment superbrand, with branches as far off as South Africa and Magaluf. ‘We have a winning recipe,’ the marketing manager of the Cape Town franchise explained. ‘Tiger Tiger is upscale but affordable – a safe spot for students and young professionals to come and let their hair down’.
The Piccadilly original opened the year before Fabric, in 1998, and in its own way came from the same spirit. The mass market democratisation of clubbing, the peak of the superclub era. Tiger Tiger was a place for people who had no clue about A Guy Called Gerald and found the drugs stuff way too weird. It came from the same genus as the Australian-themed Walkabout bars, the great sheds of cheap booze and bad pop that once stood at Charing Cross, Embankment and Shepherd’s Bush. If you didn’t know the names of any real clubs, well, these were always open, and always reassuringly the same.
In the early 2000s, big venue nightclubbing, once something exotic, was becoming something attainable, in the same way that Topshop was bringing a stylist splash to high street fashion. Something flat-packed and obvious, and not too pricey. A fleeting world where a collared shirt was your passport to sexual success.
Little wonder that it was a culture that had its heyday in the mid-2000s, the high-water mark of a certain kind of mass consumer culture, of Heat magazine and Pop Idol, of Little Britain catchphrase-comedy and Cameron Diaz flicks. The peak of a cosy consensus culture, which was also in its last gasp. By the time of the bomb, the coming recession and Spotify were about to spin that world out of sight forever.
With Tiger Tiger now deleted, the West End becomes the preserve of two very different kinds of person. The high-end Liberty sort, who moves from The Devonshire – London’s hippest new pub, where steaks are cooked not over a charcoal grill but on ‘kiln-dried oak flakes’ – to Cirque du Soir, the vaudevillian post-concert haunt of American A-listers, housing the sort of vulgarians who’d pay £100,000 for a Midas of Armand de Brignac. And then the mass market tourist, who stalks a dilapidated Oxford Street. Confused, cold.
The missing factor is the townie. Any sense that the normal-waged sort might come in from the outer boroughs or even the provinces to have a night in the West End is pretty much over. Crossrail busted a hole in a previous generation of venues, like the Astoria, which used to bring a generation of scrubbers into its Saturday ‘Frog’ indie nights. After the closure of Madame JoJo’s, the West End fully pivoted to its Polpo era of mid-market chains masquerading as high-end restaurants. Around the same time, the advent of Tinder meant that the cocktail bar overtook the seedy club as the meat market de nos jours.
Of course, over towards the east, Shoreditch, once at the cutting edge, has reconstructed itself along more mass market principles, as the cool crowd has legged it up the Kingsland Road. These days, a night in the vicinity of Liverpool Street can come with many of the same sticky floors, bad tunes, and vibe-deracinating bouncers as a night in the West End once did.
In a sense, London is reverting to its historic trend line as an agglomeration of villages. The vibe of central as being ‘in the heart of things’ has long been the dream that the West End sold. But central is no longer a tastemaker, and it is now no longer an aggregator either. It’s an extractor.
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