London can be as fluid as the River Thames in its restless movement of traffic and people, its soaring constructions and expanding demolitions. Beneath this charged surface, writes Laura Grace Ford in her zine collection Savage Messiah, “You can hear deserted places, feel the tendrils creeping out across the abandoned caverns, the derelict bunkers and broken terraces….” These spaces are reshaped by music, and among them you will find the tapped energy of the Victorian railway arch, of which there are many, both sides of the river.

Acting as a brake in the ceaseless ebb and flow of commerce, the archways on these transit routes come with a readymade darkness and genuinely shadowy ambience, sending out siren calls to the experimental and the underground, and they are still – more than 150 years after their fabrication – places where interesting things happen.

At Elephant & Castle station on Elephant Road, South East London, is a string of graffitied arches that are home to small businesses like TR Autos. Occupying arches four and five is Corsica Studios, founded by Amanda Moss and Adrian Jones, who moved the club here in 2002 after losing their premises in Corsica Street, North London, from which the venue draws its name. “This is the third arch I’ve worked in, in my 20 years of night club management,” Corsica venue manager Jamie Shearer tells me. “It feels underground, dingy, off the grid.” “It feels like you’re in a basement, even though you’re not in a basement,” adds Laura Krull, who has worked at the club for four years.

We are standing in the main studio, where the walls are pitch-black panelling and plasterboard; there’s a heavy duty pipe running through and a loaded lighting rig; behind me is a bar and a smaller dancefloor next door, with the green room upstairs. Shearer says that Jones and Moss would be amazed if they had known Corsica Studios would last 23 years in this location. The club has an impressive rollcall of acts absorbed into the fabric of its walls. “One time, Faust put a smoke bomb on the stage and the whole place had to be evacuated, mid-gig,” Shearer recalls. Faust, none the wiser, continued performing through the smoke. “The whole point is escapism,” concludes Shearer.

All this is set to change in March, when Corsica Studios closes to accommodate the surrounding developments already underway in Elephant & Castle. The strip of arches run as a distinctive, archaic seam through Elephant Road (now Elephant Central) but they are described by architectural firm Allies and Morrison, involved in the redevelopment of the area, as an “impermeable eastern perimeter to the site”. Their masterplan is to open up the “Piccadilly of the South” to a “colony of shops, restaurants and cafes” with some “affordable” housing included in the residential developments. The Corsica Studios website is at pains to shift perceptions away from assumptions of all-out commercial pressure. “Nothing lasts forever,” the statement begins, but it is difficult to be optimistic amid such blandification and identikit constructions, found everywhere. The anodyne is taking over. Where will the wildness go?

Not so far away, down a similar side street that straddles Loughborough Junction station, there is a long line of buddleia-crowned railway arches mostly given over to motor repairs, but also housing the performance venue Spanners. Intimate in scale, almost chapel-like, it is a shallow arch painted bright yellow on the outside that can pack in a crowd, with the concomitant ease of transport links that such locations provide, even as it retains a rough, independent, truly hidden quality other arches lack.

Many small venues were shaped by the rise of the superclubs of the previous century, sometimes becoming one themselves. The long established gay nightclub Heaven is one of these – it has been unfolding itself beneath Charing Cross railway station since 1979. Changing ownership has done little to dent the club’s loud, proud, rainbow-hued identity, and even the souvenir shop next to its archway entrance, selling London totes and tacky shades, seems just another extension of Heaven’s camp spirit. “That club was brilliant,” recalls Leigh Bowery’s collaborator and widow Nicola Rainbird, who frequented Heaven in the 1980s. “All those lasers – which are like all the sequins in the world!”

With its similarly impressive lighting rig playing over exposed brickwork and a 1000 capacity is The Steel Yard, a tidy polished set of three arches on a lane leading to the river, skirting Cannon Street railway bridge, itself built on the site of a tenth century steelyard in the City, London’s oldest quarter. “We’re open to everything,” says Charlie from the events team. “It’s a question of what can fill the space. To get the right sort of atmosphere, you really need 700 people.”

“Edginess, no-frills, chic industrial”: these words monetise the viaduct arch as a place to snack on counterculture, but they can also warp the setting, turning it into corporate event hires or tourism. The Leake Street graffiti tunnel beneath Waterloo station is a noisy palimpsest of layered words and images. Set in the arches and sharing the tunnel is The Vaults, an immersive theatre company. “We want talented artists from every vocation to… make stuff that is challenging, accessible and imaginative,” proclaims the venue’s website. “We are unparalleled, we are unexpected and we are under your feet.” But this venue-landlord’s decision to change the use of its tunnels in 2024, leading to the demise of the well-regarded Vault festival, London’s premier fringe theatre outlet, seems at odds with its mission statement. The graffiti overload, the loud, in your face edginess suddenly feels fake. It makes me want to run under a railway bridge and scream like Sally Bowles.

This essay appears in The Wire 503/504 along with many more critical reflections on 2025. To read them, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.