The Brixton Academy crush, four months on
The Brixton Academy crush, four months on
Key questions about the tragedy are still unanswered
Morning — it’s now been four months since a crowd crush at the Brixton Academy tragically led to two deaths. The venue now faces permanent closure, but there’s still no official word on what happened that night. We check in with the latest from the investigation after your Thursday briefing below.
Plus: Deliveroo and UberEats drivers have been hit by an immigration raid, while a big celeb has joined the fight to save a London cinema.
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What we’ve spied
🛵 The Home Office has arrested sixty fast food delivery drivers across London in a week-long crackdown on alleged immigration offences. Moped riders for Deliveroo, JustEat and UberEats were arrested between April 16 and April 21 for false documentation and working illegally in the UK. Immigration officers had carried out “extensive intelligence-gathering” ahead of the operation, as the Home Office claims London is seeing an increase in immigration offences by gig economy workers. But the App Drivers and Couriers Union criticised the raid, saying it is “not the role of the police to make immigration checks on the streets in this way”.
📣 Extinction Rebellion has vowed to step up action after its non-disruptive outing in central London ended without the government meeting its climate demands. The group had called for the government to discuss banning new fossil fuel projects by 5pm on Monday, but to no avail. XR has released a statement saying it will now “reach out to supporter organisations to start creating a plan for stepping up our campaigns across an ecosystem of tactics that includes everyone from first-time protesters to those willing to go to prison”. Meanwhile, Just Stop Oil has been holding up traffic in London with slow marches. No disruption to the marathon on Sunday, by the way.
🚨 Police are investigating a fire at a flat in Whitechapel as a transgender hate crime. A gay man and transgender women were in the flat on the high street when the fire was started just before 6.30am on Friday, April 14. No injuries were reported, but detectives are treating the fire as suspicious.
🏚️ The number of empty homes in London has risen to its highest level since 2010, figures reveal. The data shows more than 34,000 properties were classed as “long-term vacant” as of March 2022, with the highest in Southwark, where 2,400 are empty. Quite the gut punch, given London’s chronic lack of housing. For further reading, see Spy, March 7 2023, where we explored Westminster’s recent attempts to deal with empty homes in central London.
📽️ Steven Spielberg has joined the fight to stop a cinema in Mayfair from changing hands. The filmmaker says it would be a “travesty” if the current operator of the Curzon Mayfair couldn’t keep running the cinema after the lease ends in March 2024. The Curzon was built in the 1930s and has been described by Historic England as one of the “finest surviving cinema buildings of the post-war period”.
🎵 Iconic London venue Printworks is closing for good next week. Though the venue was originally intended to be temporary when it opened five years ago, it definitely had to shut down after Southwark council approved a redevelopment of the surrounding area, which will see Printworks turned into offices. There are a few farewell parties in the calendar ahead of its final day on May 7.
🚆 Hype is building for the completion of the Elizabeth Line, which will start running at full capacity next month. Train frequency is being boosted so that a train will run roughly every two and a half minutes between Paddington and Whitechapel at peak times.
The Brixton Academy crush: Key questions still unanswered
Four months have passed since the crowd crush at the Brixton O2 Academy, in which two people died — but we’re still basically in the dark about what went wrong, at least officially. No answers or criminal charges yet from the Metropolitan Police, which is still investigating how the December 15 concert at the south London gig venue ended so tragically.
Unofficially though, some things have come up. Witnesses have contested the prevailing narrative that ticketless fans storming the venue caused the crush. Meanwhile, anonymous sources have suggested security guards on the door were taking bribes.
Whether the Met has found the same remains to be seen. But this week the force made a move that gives a sense of how seriously it views the safety failings. On Tuesday it came to light that the Met wants to permanently revoke the venue’s licence, having been unconvinced of the operator’s plans to make things right. It lodged an application for a licence review on April 17 with Lambeth council, arguing that the three-month ban on the venue re-opening put in place in January should be extended indefinitely. “The MPS has lost confidence in the premises licence holder,” the application on Lambeth council’s website reads.
Actual detail about what’s driving the Met’s decision isn’t forthcoming. In the application’s box for supporting information sits a big redacted mark, blocking out any clue as to what the Met has so far found in its investigation.
We may find out soon — Lambeth council’s licensing committee will be meeting to discuss the Met’s demands. Until then, here are the key questions about the Brixton Academy crush that the Spy thinks need answering.
Did those outside have tickets? The immediate reporting around the crush was quick to describe the crowd outside as “ticketless”. The 5,000-capacity concert by afrobeats artist Asake kicked off at 8pm that evening, but by 9pm a crowd of 1,000 people had gathered outside appearing to want to get in. Many took this to mean that gatecrashers had turned up, and it was the chaos that ensued that overloaded the venue.
But several witness accounts published in the aftermath have put this in doubt. One witness told the Guardian in days following the crush that they were stuck outside despite having a ticket. She said: “we had our tickets ready, and then suddenly the crowd just surged. I think whatever was happening up the front, I couldn’t see clearly, someone must have been frustrated and started pushing. I started to get suffocated because everyone started moving and pushing and we were already hemmed in.”
This witness goes on to suggest that security guards then “kettled” fans into a confined space, exacerbating the crush. As the crowd tried to push towards the front steps of the venue, she said, “the security moved the barricades there to hem us in again so there was no exit out on to the streets without jumping over a barricade”. They went on to say: “They endangered our lives, they endangered my life.”
Were security guards bribed? Another eyebrow-raising possibility about the crush came in January. A whistleblower told the BBC that security guards at Brixton Academy — employed by AP Security — regularly took bribes to let people in without tickets. They claim that bouncers would accept a few and then get greedy, sometimes making up to £1,000 a night.
The subject of bribes even reportedly came up in briefings and conversations between managers and bouncers, but no one was reprimanded. "Our company knew what was going on and they knew the people who were doing it… and they did nothing about it,” the whistleblower told the BBC. AP Security declined to comment on the BBC’s story.
How should other London venues be reacting? The Brixton Academy crowd crush is a grim reminder to Londoners of the risks they face in a busy city. But, as of yet, there have been no universal changes to how the capital’s venues are run in light of the crush.
So far the only top-level word on what may happen to the law or government guidance came in March, in the House of Commons. Florence Eshalomi, the MP for Vauxhall, asked Julia Lopez, a minister at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, if she’d meet to discuss the government’s role in learning lessons from the crush. Lopez replied by saying the government was waiting until the conclusion of the Met’s investigation, and will take action based on the issues the force highlights.
Is there any way the Brixton Academy could re-open? As news broke this week about the Met’s licensing application, some were quick to jump to Brixton Academy’s defence. They argue that despite the tragedy, the venue’s permanent closure will be a body blow to London’s nightlife, which is already under strain from the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis.
But it’s important to note that the Met’s application may only mean the Brixton Academy closing in its current form, under the management of its current operator, Academy Music Group. It may be the case that authorities deem it safe enough if another operator takes over. Ultimately, the future of the Brixton Academy rests on whether the causes of the crush lie in bad management, bad actors or inherent problems with how the venue is set up.