THE UNDER-USED Hackney Central Station at the corner of Amhurst Road and Mare Street is to become Oslo, a music club.
From next month November 2013 up to 600 clubbers are likely to be filling Oslo’s two floors which, says its operator, DHP Family, will be decorated in a “dark Nordic aesthetic”.
By day it will be “a hub to meet and eat” and at nights it will run to no later than 2.30am on Sundays to Thursdays and on Fridays and Saturdays to 3am as a club and also as a venue for pop concerts. Alcohol sales will end half an hour earlier.
An earlier attempt to run a club in the 1870-erected station ended last decade. The building at E8 1LL has been mostly neglected since a dull and clunky (try rushing through the turnstiles at peak periods) new station was built near by.
DHP Family, which runs Rock City in Nottingham, Thekla in Bristol and other venues in England, has obtained a site with excellent transport links.
It is not far from the Hackney Empire and hipster pubs the Cock and the Old Ship. It is near the intended site of a Travelodge hotel.
DHP Family managing director George Akins said the aim was to make Oslo somewhere “to hang out” in and “a venue for the best new music”.
A “top manager” who had worked at Shoreditch House and House of Wolves had been recruited. Oslo, said Akins, would be “something really special in Hackney”.
Local resident Jean Field told Loving Dalston: “It would be much nicer to have the building as a proper station. The present one is too small.”
Hamish Scott 141013
* Oslo, 1a Amhurst Rd, London E8 1LL (020 3553 4831). Disabled access ramps, lift to second (music) floor not installed.
* Backstory: Travelodge for Hackney Central
* Pictures, by David Altheer, added after this article was published.
* Emboldened underscored words in most cases indicate a hyperlink, a reader service rare among websites. If a link does not work, it is probably because the site to which the URL refers has not been maintained.