The End: the club built by two DJs that gave LCD Soundsystem their second-ever show
Two DJs, a £250,000 bank loan and a former Post Office building - and fourteen years later it had hosted a Mercury Prize winner and Fatboy Slim's UK number one, both while playing there.
Two DJs and a Post Office building
The End opened on 2 December 1995, started by DJs Layo Paskin and Mr C on a £250,000 bank loan plus £400,000 from investors, in a Bloomsbury basement that had previously housed Post Office delivery horses. Layo's father, Douglas Paskin, designed the space. It opened with an 800 capacity, later expanded to 1,000-1,200 once the AKA bar next door joined it in 1998.
The programming ran techno and house on Saturdays, drum & bass and breakbeat on Fridays, an indie night called Trash on Mondays, dubstep on Wednesdays and DTPM's Sunday afternoons - a spread wide enough that different nights built entirely different audiences under one roof.
Who played there
Roni Size held a residency at The End the year he won the Mercury Prize in 1997. Fatboy Slim was resident when he reached UK number one in 1998. Zero 7 were residents for two years before their 2001 debut album. Scissor Sisters played their first UK show there, and LCD Soundsystem played their second show ever at the venue in 2002 - the kind of booking history that gets cited whenever anyone writes about how a club shapes what happens next in music rather than just hosting it.
By 2005 the club was turning over more than £5 million a year with £500,000 in profit, a scale most clubs covered in this section never reached even at their commercial peak.
Closure, and what has happened to the building since
The End closed in 2009 after a final 24-hour closing party. The building sold for £8 million and reopened as The Den in May 2009 under new ownership, which itself closed in July 2012 after its licence was revoked over violence and drug complaints. As of the most recent reporting, the building remains derelict on West Central Street, with redevelopment still expected rather than done - Que Club's situation in Birmingham, not Bagley's or Labyrinth's.
The End's own 30th anniversary was marked with a three-night event at KOKO in October 2025 - the brand outliving the building by well over a decade.