291 Hackney Road,
London,
E2 8NA
0872 148 2762
The ViewLondon Review
A vast, gaping, gothic Church on the Shoreditch/Hackney borders – converted into an arts space, club venue, restaurant and bar.
Here local, self-created leftwing artists and post-dotcom boomers talk paint techniques, play backgammon and swig bottled beer or house wine against a backdrop of cutting-edge art installations.
291’s main bar is on the opposite side of the foyer to the door – long, narrow, and bustling during popular events staged in the galleries. Don’t expect watercolour landscapes though.
As befits this brutalist, bohemian, Hackney location, the art is cutting-edge and unconventional – expect roadkill montages and nude prints jauntily hung from the Tudor rafters, five feet above eye level.
The beer garden, recommended for Sunday brunch, is an Eden-like break from the usual east London concrete and brickwork confections, and the upstairs restaurant serves rustic food, with unctuous home-made sauces.
And with its vast, haunted spaces, 291 is ideal for club nights. The roster doesn’t yet reflect this, despite the odd gem such as Return to the Rural, an ‘Idyllica’ club night which elects to ‘put the hay back into haywire; the dance back into dance culture and the bull back into red bull’.
Club-goers join hands and barn dance to the jangling rhythms of a traditional ceilidh band, against a backdrop of hay bales, bunting and tractor projections. Amongst the rest, look out for world music and funk nights.
Likely to hear: ‘Yah, like an installation of a baby on a chopping board, fan-tast-ic’, ‘But how do you get spray mount out of pubic hair’?
Likely to see: Fleetingly, fiercely fashionable types, dressed in jarring colour combinations, smoking Gauloise and looking sullen.
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