On the last Sunday in March, Kode9, SHERELLE, Pearson Sound, Josey Rebelle and Daniel Avery took turns in the two railway arches on Elephant Road, and Corsica Studios said goodbye. The closing run had lasted three months. Mixmag’s photographer caught the last of it: hugs, reunions and a lot of people who clearly had no intention of going home.
Then the sound system went off, and Elephant and Castle got the silence it had been asking for.
Nobody officially evicted the club. Its co-founder, Adrian Jones, told the Guardian last October that the developers’ message had been that Corsica could “stay as long as it wants”. There was one condition. From 1 April, when the first residents moved into the new homes backing onto the smoking area, the club couldn’t make any noise.
For a nightclub, that’s an eviction with better manners.
How did an art space from Highbury end up under a railway in SE17?
The name gives it away. Corsica Studios started life on Corsica Street in Highbury, set up by the artist Amanda Moss and Jones, an experimental rock musician. DJ Mag’s farewell feature in April described that first space as a white-painted gallery where sculpture sat next to electronic music.
In 2002 the pair moved south to a pair of arches at 4/5 Elephant Road, a short walk from the roundabout, and kept the white paint. Capacity was around 500, split between a main room and a smaller studio next door. Boiler Room used it as an early base from 2010. Hyperdub threw parties there for years. Fred again.., Four Tet and Bicep all played the arches, and the size of the room had a lot to do with that: rooms of around 500 are where electronic acts are small enough to take risks and big enough to be heard, and London has been losing them for a decade. Moss died in 2017; Jones carried on.
The arches also became a refuge for nights made homeless elsewhere. Jaded, the Sunday-morning party for people who refuse to stop, settled at Corsica after Cable under London Bridge shut in 2013 – a club closed, as it happens, to make room for station redevelopment. Corsica described itself as a not-for-profit arts complex whose purpose was to grow culture in areas of regeneration. It did that for 24 years. Regeneration finished the job.
Why did the dancefloor pay for the dance classes?
Because nothing else made money. As DJ Mag told it, the club nights, and above all the bar takings, were one of the few parts of the operation that turned a profit, and they quietly subsidised everything else: bands and dance classes, and the art the place had been founded for. The raving paid for the culture. London’s planning system has never quite known what to do with a building like that, and it showed.
What exactly did the developers say?
Elephant and Castle has spent the best part of two decades being rebuilt. The Heygate Estate came down to make way for Elephant Park. The old pink shopping centre closed in 2020 and was demolished for a new town centre scheme led by Delancey, with thousands of homes and a new entrance to the Northern line. Corsica sat in the middle of all of it, underneath the tracks, making the kind of low-end that travels through brick.
The developers didn’t ignore it. According to Mixmag and NME, Delancey gave the club £125,000 for soundproofing back in 2018. In 2020 Arts Council England gave it a £400,000 Covid relief grant. By 2023, Southwark News was reporting that the venue was under threat from the next phase of the scheme, that Southwark Council had offered an alternative site nearby, and that people close to Corsica considered the costs of relocating, soundproofing and relicensing unviable.
Then came October 2025. The announcement opened with “Nothing lasts forever”. In the same Instagram statement, the club said plainly that it wasn’t closing because of noise complaints, that it wasn’t being forced out by the developers or the council, and that running a late-night venue in the middle of a huge development had become increasingly difficult. It had spent years working with Southwark, the Greater London Authority and the Music Venue Trust on some kind of future.
Jones filled in the rest for the Guardian. New flats backed directly onto the smoking area. The first residents were due on 1 April 2026. After that date the club could stay, but silently.
What happens next is a refurbishment. Under a Section 106 agreement – the legal deal a developer signs with the council in exchange for planning permission – the arches will be soundproofed at Delancey’s expense and handed back in 2027. Corsica’s team has first refusal. The club’s statement promised a solid long-term lease and legal measures to protect the future venue from noise complaints.
Jones, for his part, sounded more guarded than the statement. In the Guardian interview he pointed to the 24 years he had already given to Elephant, which is the sort of thing people say before they decide whether they have another decade in them.
Isn’t that a happy ending?
It’s a tidy one. The building survives, the developer pays and the council gets a soundproofed cultural space in its new town centre. Mind you, what people loved was a particular crew running a particular kind of night, loudly, in those arches. The deal preserves the arches and closes the club.
To be fair to everyone involved, the club’s own team called it the best outcome available, and they know the numbers better than any blogger. I believe them. That’s the indictment. When the best result a well-run, complaint-free venue can negotiate under London’s planning rules is to shut and hope to be invited back, the rules have become a polite way of arranging a venue’s departure.
Where was the agent of change?
London is supposed to have a rule for exactly this situation. The agent of change principle, written into the London Plan as policy D13, says that whoever arrives second has to deal with the noise. If you build flats next to an existing music venue, it’s your job – the developer’s job – to soundproof the flats, the venue or both. The venue shouldn’t have to go quiet because you’ve moved in. The same idea went into the national planning rules in 2018, after years of campaigning by the Music Venue Trust and others.
On paper, Elephant and Castle followed the rule. The developer is paying. The venue has a route back.
In practice, the venue closed.
Here is where I’ll pick a fight. Southwark Council should have insisted the arches were soundproofed years before anyone moved into homes backing onto a working club’s smoking area – done in stages, around Corsica’s opening hours if need be – so the first residents arrived next to a quieter club rather than a closed one. Everyone knew the dates. The order of works was a choice, and the choice put the flats first and the dancefloor into a gap of a year or more that may swallow it.
Who pays for the gap?
The promoters, first. A club that closes for more than a year doesn’t pause. Its regular nights find other homes and its crowd drifts off to Peckham or Tottenham. Nobody hands those back in 2027 along with the keys.
What does Elephant and Castle lose in the meantime?
The last place in the neighbourhood that felt like it hadn’t been designed by a focus group.
It also loses the footfall that nobody puts in a regeneration brochure: the Saturday crowd queuing on Elephant Road at midnight and the kebab shops that stayed open for them. The new town centre will have plenty of daytime life. Its nights are an open question.
Corsica had already outlived most of the old Elephant. It stayed open through the Heygate demolition and the shopping centre coming down. In June 2021 it was evacuated when fire broke out in the arches by the station, and it came back from that too. What it couldn’t outlive was the arrival of its own neighbours.
Will the new Elephant miss it?
Some of it will. Plenty of the people moving into the flats by the smoking area will have picked Elephant and Castle partly for its edge, the edge that places like Corsica gave it. That’s the oldest joke in London regeneration, and it stopped being funny about fifteen years ago.
Will anyone recognise Corsica Studios in 2027?
The arches will be there. So will a new lease and, if the promises hold, legal protection against complaints the old club never had.
What’s missing is a guarantee of who walks back in. Corsica’s team has first refusal, and only Jones can decide whether to use it. For now the arches on Elephant Road belong to the soundproofing contractors.
