A multimedia commercial development worth more than £1 billion is set to open beside London’s Tottenham Court Road Tube station early next year, promising all the trappings of corporate investment: brand partnerships, pop-up product launches and luxury hospitality. Its critics cry gentrification; its proponents argue it will revitalise nearby Denmark Street – London’s “Tin Pan Alley”, home to a dizzying array of guitar and music shops and punk music’s ground zero.
Glen Matlock was just 17 when he joined the Sex Pistols. A strait-laced grammar-school boy with a part-time job in Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s shop, Let It Rock – later, and infamously, Sex – he was headhunted for the band by McLaren after mentioning that he played bass. Within two years, by the autumn of 1975, Matlock had finished studying art at Saint Martin’s and was living with guitarist Steve Jones across the road from his college, in a studio space at 6 Denmark Street. McLaren had bought the lease for the property for £1,000, flat unseen, from Bill Collins, an ex-roadie for The Beatles and manager of the Welsh power pop band Badfinger. “I don’t think [Collins] ever got his thousand pounds,” recalls Matlock.
Over the next two years, the Denmark Street studio flat would become the Pistols’ base of operations. Matlock and Jones lived there together above the rehearsal space – “It was hard work kipping” – with Jones occasionally fencing stolen instruments in shops on the street below. In 1977, Matlock left the band, but Denmark Street wasn’t out of his life yet. Shortly after the Pistols broke up a year later, Matlock went on to lease the space himself and remembers jamming there with Chrissie Hynde, Mick Jones and synth-pop wizards Bronski Beat. Later, members of Bananarama also lived there, “But that,” says Matlock, “was after I’d gone.”
Denmark Street is often referred to in clichéd terms as the Mecca for rock’n’roll; this is true, in that it boasts a similar preponderance of bearded men, though they tend to be fonder of strong drink and leather jackets. The musical history of the flat at No6 is typical of this 100-yard stretch of dirty asphalt, which has been a hub of the recording industry for nearly a century. Elton John and Bernie Taupin first wrote music together on Denmark Street in the 1960s and swapped ideas at the Lancaster Grill, a greasy spoon just around the corner. Bowie conceived of Ziggy Stardust at La Gioconda, a café at 9 Denmark Street and a favourite spot for Hendrix and The Small Faces. The NME and Melody Maker both had their offices on the street, as did the design studio Hipgnosis, where art students thought up album covers for the likes of Pink Floyd and Electric Light Orchestra. Later, in the 1990s and until 2015, Denmark Street was home to the 12 Bar Club, where Adele, Jamie T and The Libertines got their breaks.
And yet, like its most famous residents, Denmark Street has aged. It’s far from the rock paradise it was at its height; more middle-aged John Lydon than spitting, furious Johnny Rotten. The 12 Bar Club has been gone five years now, just one of the 20 per cent of small UK music venues estimated to have closed between 2004 and 2019 (London’s have been the worst hit, as steep rents and high property prices induce venue owners to sell up). The Astoria, the area’s other esteemed major music venue, was demolished in 2009, a compulsory purchase by the government to make way for Crossrail. Such is the rate of change around Denmark Street, it can often seem like the area is under siege; a cheap, scuzzy anomaly amid a sea of luxury London developments. In 2014, the architectural historian and columnist Simon Jenkins declared in the Evening Standard that Denmark Street was “a mere ghost of its past”. A month later, a Guardian article set out to explain “Why London’s music scene has been rocked by the death of Denmark Street”.
Happily, they were wrong. It’s far too soon to declare the road dead. Denmark Street remains the definitive London destination if you’re in the market for a guitar (I bought my own first cheap Ibanez there as a teenager, after resisting the temptation to be up-sold on a lovely Oxblood Les Paul by a wily shop assistant). But in an age when young creatives are more likely to rock the world by sitting in their bedroom producing beats on Pro Tools or Cubase, collaborating with each other online without ever touching a guitar, some of the shops can feel frustratingly low-tech, even unambitious. Jan Smosarski, the owner of Denmark Street music shop Sixty Six Sounds, has worked on the street for ten years and agrees that though the locale is still a draw for tourists and musicians alike, there’s no guarantee it will remain so. “It feels like an evergreen destination,” Smosarski says. In the two years he has been running his own shop, which specialises in Gibson guitars, he’s had high-profile visitors including Harry Styles and David Beckham. The area is still an icon of British music. “But I think the landlords are aware that you can’t rest on your laurels with that.”
Smosarski’s right: they are more than aware. For most of the area’s music shops, the landlord is Consolidated Developments, a company that has been buying up land in Soho for years. Founded in 1983, by 2018 Consolidated owned some £450 million in investment property around Central London, including almost all of Denmark Street. It is, quite obviously, long past the point that squeezing guitar sellers for a few thousand pounds of extra rent is going to have much effect on revenue. Instead, Consolidated has green-lighted one of the most ambitious building projects in London in living memory, leasing the block between New Oxford Street, Charing Cross Road, Earnshaw Way and Denmark Street for a massive new development called Outernet.
From February 2021, if Glen Matlock heads to Denmark Street to buy guitar strings, he will be confronted as he walks out of Tottenham Court Road Tube station with a massive, cavernous atrium partially open to the elements and entirely clad in sleek LED screens. What exactly will be on those screens will depend on the time and the day, but, broadly, it would likely come under the nebulous banner of “sponsored content”. Matlock would be looking at the most visible aspect of the Outernet development, the Now Building, which will be home to the largest 360-degree, floor-to-ceiling 8K LED screens in the world, and will be available for hire by the very biggest brands. Say Adidas is dropping its new collaboration with Pharrell at Outernet that day. Matlock might have to push through the crowds staring up at the sneaker on the LED screens, before passing fans waiting to head into the new 2,000-capacity music venue below ground, where the idea is Pharrell would be booked in to play. Or say there was a new Star Wars film out, he might have to skirt the premiere, as the film’s trailer plays overhead on the atrium’s huge screens and John Boyega and Daisy Ridley walk the red carpet below.
If it sounds self-consciously futuristic, that’s because it is. Outernet fits within a wider rejig of what ultra-Central London will look like for the next couple of decades at least; it is a project similar in scale to the ongoing plans to part-pedestrianise Oxford Street and it will reshape that area in the same way the Embassy Gardens development did in Nine Elms just south of the river. Once the development is complete, the Outernet site will be worth somewhere in the region of £1bn and feature office space, restaurants and a hotel called the Chateau Denmark. Around 400,000 people are expected to pass through the Now Building atrium daily.
So far, this proposition is not unlike any other expensive development in a top-tier global city: sanitised, Blackstone-funded brand spaces and hospitality most people can’t afford, with lucrative plans afoot for similar projects in New York and Los Angeles. Yet the difference here is that the Outernet project also features recording studios that will be available, entirely free of charge, to the public. It will have dedicated busking spots and that as-yet unnamed 2,000-capacity venue is the first of its size to open in the area since the 1940s. Two smaller venues are opening to accompany it, including one at 26 Denmark Street, in the old 12 Bar Club’s building. Not content just to pay lip service to it, Outernet’s architects have woven the area’s musical heritage into the very fabric of the development. Most importantly, they have guaranteed very favourable long-term leases to the music shops on Denmark Street.
“The vision,” says Philip O’Ferrall, “is to launch the world’s first connected, global, immersive entertainment brand.” O’Ferrall is the president and CEO of Outernet and his CV reads like a list of the channels you (or your children) might have hopped as a teenager. He came to the project after 16 years as a vice president at Viacom, where he was responsible for running the commercial side of MTV, Paramount, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and BET everywhere outside North America. O’Ferrall has brought MTV execs with him on to the Outernet project and has been busy commissioning material by video artists and broadcasters to fill the screens, including signing a deal with Sir Ridley Scott’s production outfit Black Dog Films.
Naturally, for a man who has spent his career at the top of one of the world’s biggest corporate entities, O’Ferrall’s vision for Outernet is as hard-headed and business-driven as it is ambitious. “To launch a live music venue in any city, particularly in London,” he admits, “is very, very hard to make work, because they’re closed more than they’re open.” But add in the possibility of renting that same live venue out during the daytime for, say, a Nickelodeon event, plus the 400,000 captive pairs of eyes per day that will ogle whatever Nickelodeon chooses to beam up on the above-ground atrium – the screens are so gigantic there will be barely anywhere else to look – and the economics of a new venue begin to make more sense. Advertising and luxury offerings become Outernet’s tentpole sources of income, the argument goes, allowing it to maintain the diversity and history of Denmark Street’s shops (although this is only true of guitar shops; a laundrette and betting shop are among tenants that have not benefitted from the low-rent deal).
This contradictory tension is at the heart of Outernet’s plans to redevelop Denmark Street and it is also what gives it its soul. Outernet is a global project that also seeks to safeguard one of the most traditionally chaotic streets in Central London from the top down – and, naturally, it wants something in return. O’Ferrall is hoping some of Denmark Street’s cool will rub off. The partnership works, though it seems full of paradoxes: Denmark Street, traditional home of punk paupers, needs Outernet’s cash and footfall and the palatial, well-heeled Outernet development needs Denmark Street’s cultural cachet. The guitar shops and small venues will be the plovers that clean the multinational crocodile’s teeth.
Denmark Street has always had a rough-and-ready side. Matlock’s stories of Chrissie Hynde and Bronski Beat sound glamorous in hindsight, but he also recalls Maltese gangsters coming round to collect protection money from his barber while he was having his hair cut and junkies dumping their used syringes over the brick wall behind the Pistols’ flat. In 1980, Denmark Place was the site of London’s deadliest post-War arson attack, when 37 people burned to death in an unlicensed shebeen. Smosarski, the guitar shop owner, sums it up well when he explains how his is “one of the few jobs where you can serve a crack addict and a billionaire in the same day”. O’Ferrall is aware of this edgy history. “We don’t want to Disneyfy the street,” he says. “That commitment to those small businesses, while building hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of screens a few yards away? They’re two very different projects, but they’re directly, inherently linked.” As evidence of their commitment, he points to the project’s planned reopening of the 12 Bar Club. The old forge building, which housed the club, was “literally underpinned, moved, we dug down two storeys and then we’re moving the building back. So it’s effectively a four-storey, 500-capacity venue on Denmark Street. And it will only be cool if it’s still cool.”
Money and punks don’t naturally mix. Not everyone is as enamoured with the Outernet development as Smosarski; the Guardian has indignantly branded Outernet “an emotionless touchscreen void where engaging with ‘brands’ is the most important aspect of anyone’s day”. Preserving punk history is controversial, too, even among its would-be scions. After graffiti drawn on the walls by John Lydon – then Johnny Rotten – helped, in 2016, secure heritage status for No6, Malcolm McLaren’s son, Joseph Corré, the cofounder of the Agent Provocateur lingerie chain, alongside his mother, Vivienne Westwood, burned a heap of punk memorabilia worth £5m on a barge on the Thames in protest. “Punk has become another marketing tool to sell you something you don’t need,” Corré announced at the time (he was not without his own detractors; Henry Rollins, frontman of seminal California hardcore act Black Flag, called the protest a “corny stunt”). O’Ferrall is aware of the concern and quick to address it. “We know every single [music] shop owner well on Denmark Street. If you go and talk to any of them, they’ll tell you that we’ve been loyal to them.” Whatever the case, it’s hard to shake the impression that opposition from a local business towards Outernet would be akin to throwing a tennis ball at a tank.
For his part, Smosarski is full of praise for Outernet and Consolidated’s treatment of local businesses, explaining that when he first pitched the idea for his business to Outernet’s chief operating officer and Consolidated director Richard Metcalfe, Metcalfe leased him prime Denmark Street premises a year earlier than they were originally scheduled to go on the market. “I always felt, personally,” says Smosarski, “like Denmark Street needed a change.” Every time a figure such as Eric Clapton plays at the Royal Albert Hall, Smosarski notes, Denmark Street receives a measurable influx of customers interested in learning guitar. So, he reasons, if there’s a 2,000-capacity venue barely 100 yards away, plus two smaller ones, music shops such as his will be first in line to reap the rewards. “For it to work, you have to have the street, in essence, as it is now. But you [also] need to bring it kicking and screaming into the 21st century. I’m aware of the money that’s being pulled in, but I feel that they only have the interests of the street at heart. They get what it is.” In the longer term, Smosarski aims to open a members’ club at Sixty Six Sounds and has launched his own clothing line.
Whether Outernet “saves” Denmark Street depends on your definition of the word and what level of expectation you have of the locale. It won’t be the same filthy, furious place it might have been in the 1970s, by any means, but then it was never going to be that again. What is an indisputable fact, though, is that three new music venues and a state-of-the-art recording studio are opening in the West End and the Denmark Street guitar shops are – for now – safe from the threat of eviction. A vast new event space will open and a potential new London landmark. Johnny Rotten’s graffiti will remain an official heritage site. “You can argue that the principal notion of punk,” says Smosarski, “is ‘Fuck the establishment,’ but I think that there are certain things that attain a level of longevity. It’s a balance.” And, for Matlock, change is natural. “Things move on,” he agrees. He has been working as a musician for 45 years, of which only two-and-a-half were spent in the Pistols; this year, he’s touring the UK, playing rockabilly versions of Pistols classics. “The way of the universe is to default to a state of flux. And that’s everything.”
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