Miles Street,
Vauxhall,
London,
SW8 1RZ
(0844) 736 5375
The ViewLondon Review
Get your skates on if you like cheesy listening, fast speeds and high camp. This is one roller disco with its tongue firmly in cheek.
The Venue
Inside Renaissance Rooms there’s plenty of room for wheelies. For the numerically obsessive, this warehouse-like venue clocks in at 16,000 square foot with a 2,270 capacity. It boasts two large rooms on ground floor level (which can be made into one massive space). There’s also a more intimate first floor mezzanine bar that often serves as the VIP room. Oh, and don’t forget the garden terrace for smoking.
The Atmosphere
Big hair, lip-gloss and lurid fashions are the order of the day for Renaissance Rooms, since many women dress in an approximation of ‘70s and ‘80s fashions. Some could be dancers straight out of Jennifer Beal’s legwarmer epic Flashdash; others are an explosion of flirty layers and clashing colours like Cyndi Lauper in the ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ era. A big style statement can compensate for little skating skill. Meanwhile, for men, the more costumed you arrive, then the more drunk you should become, apparently.
The Music
Thursday’s ‘Quatro por Cuatro’ (which translates as 4x4) is a tapas of assorted Latin sounds, whilst on Fridays and Saturdays you get two rooms of distinct flavours. There’s feverish disco and funk in Arena One, and anything house in Arena Two. The name of the game is to drink up, forget your brusied behind and lose yourself in a whirl of retro fantasy.
The Drink
There’s a fully stocked bar at Renaissance Rooms, offering everything from bottled beer to Champagne. However they definitely don’t offer retro prices. You can expect to have little change from a tenner on a small round.
The Last Word
Amid the merry-go-round of skaters and corny tunes at regular romp, Roller Disco, its easy to forget that Renaissance Rooms was previously home to cool and cutting edge parties like Space Ibiza’s London outings, gay muscle monthly Action and that omnisexual fetish fashionfest, The Torture Garden. Apparently dance one-nighters still crop-up sometimes, but for the moment Renaissance Rooms seems to be giving the retro roller craze a spin.