By Cat Lewis
On a recent Friday night, the girls and I headed to Camden, a London neighborhood with a deep history in punk and English counterculture.
We got dressed up, a little pre-drinks drunk, and walked to the legendary club KOKO for a night of techno. I was excited: I pictured myself dancing under the giant disco ball, a signature feature of the venue.
KOKO is one of London’s oldest nightclubs, and a cultural institution in UK nightlife. KOKO opened as a stage theatre in 1900 and was one of London’s largest theatres for many years.
Over the last century, many icons have played there, including Prince, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, The Prodigy, Iron Maiden, and Madonna, who chose KOKO in 1983 for her debut UK performance.
In the 1990s, KOKO led the London rave scene with rave nights like Clockwork Orange, which defined the UK’s Acid House movement.
I don’t know if my friends knew this history, but I did, and it made KOKO meaningful and exciting to me. That night, it was my friend’s birthday, and I was there to celebrate her.
Getting in took more time than I remembered. Security was tight, which I supposed was to be expected in central London. In the queue, we joked about how old we felt compared to others waiting. I’m 40, but even so, when my time came, I gave my ID to be scanned while a security person snapped a photo of me. After a thorough bag search, metal detector scan, and final pat-down, I was in. It felt like going through airport security.
Then it was time to dance.
Walking into KOKO always gives me a buzz. The decor pulls from the venue’s baroque, rococo-era theater roots: ruby-red walls, gilded plasterwork, and a marble proscenium arch. In the center of the venue, there’s a huge dancefloor flanked by a wraparound balcony, giving people on upper floors a full overhead view of the throbbing dancefloor below. I love a lookout, so I like to stay on the upper floors, looking down.
The artist of the night was Bradley Zero, who promised a rollicking eight-hour set to celebrate the 15th birthday of Rhythm Section, his independent record label and growing community of music lovers. Bradley Zero was apparently a big draw: even on early ticket entry, the dancefloor was already looking full.
I noted to my friends the club’s features: It has a custom-designed d&b audiotechnik XSL System, paired with d&b V-Series speakers covering every balcony.
The club’s setup delivers a pristine, chest-pounding sound, which in this case may be better described by my friend, who said: “Fucking hell, it’s loud!”
I was, admittedly, new to Bradley Zero. My friend was a big fan, so I was excited to hear them. I love that KOKO is still a place where real music heads and people who follow and appreciate good DJs and producers go to rave. Most nights there, you can spot old-school ravers and die-hard techno fans. I spoke to some people there who said they had come to hear the vinyl-only artist play some eclectic, meticulously chosen records.
Then other things happened that took my mind off the music.
At about 11, with the summer heatwave hitting London with 28-degree temperatures, we went outside to the top-floor balcony to get some air. Up there, smokers stood toe to toe. After squeezing through the crowd, we found a corner to hang out in, and soon my friend had a man’s hand around her hips. She politely (maybe a little too politely) told him he was wasting his time. It rattled us, but we decided to not let it kill the vibe we had.
After that, we decided to get drinks. The bar staff were kind and chatty. It was a basic bar of spirits and mixers, and we joked with the staff about the lack of espresso martinis, to which one replied, “Ugh, I hate my job.”
He talked about it. Bartending in London clubs has started to feel like being a human-powered vending machine: customer wants a drink, serve the customer a can, take the money, next. He missed the days of drink requests, mixology, and the craft of making cocktails. But this was faster, more efficient, assembly-line-style drink production: a commercial move.
I ordered us a vodka lime soda and a gin and tonic. We were served two glasses, and they had strange coverings on top. I had never seen them before: they seemed like stickers, thin pieces of plastic over the mouths of the glasses with little holes in them for straws.
“Why do you serve drinks with these weird covers on?” I asked. The bartender said they’re anti-spiking covers, and they’ve had to start using them because there have been several incidents of drink spiking recently, enough to force them to take measures against it.
He said the venue has developed a problematic reputation, or rather, attracts a problematic crowd. Spiking has been an ongoing issue, he said, and lately it’s been on the rise.
“It’s especially bad on non-ticketed nights,” he said.
This left me feeling perplexed, alarmed, murky. How much can a club be held responsible for the crowd it draws? They were taking measures to prevent it, this was so: the tight security, the pat-downs, the drink covers.
But why had KOKO emerged as a place where this was done? On the one hand, I saw the good intention of enforcing anti-spiking drink covers; on the other, I felt a little angry that I paid an entry fee and premium drink prices for a place that now made me feel unsafe. To whom must I direct this anger? Who was responsible?
My friends and I decided it was time to dance, so we picked a spot on one of the balconies overlooking the dance floor, a place less crowded. But now words like “spiking” and “predator” were in our heads, and we all seemed to simultaneously notice, across the venue, how many guys appeared to be there alone.
Why did that make me feel so strange? There was, after all, nothing wrong with going to a club alone. I’ve been to many gigs solo to hear artists I loved. But when I looked at the men there, while sipping my drink through the anti-spiking cover, old fears appeared in my mind again: Was there something strange, untrustworthy, about the men there, something off? Maybe it was how they stared constantly; maybe it was how they weren’t dancing, just walking around.
Was it all in my head? Was it real? Were they just waiting for their friends? Or were they, indeed, men there to harm someone like me?
Then we had to use the bathroom. In line for the toilet, we overheard conversations women around us were having and realized we were not the only ones feeling this way:
The women in front of us in the queue talked about some creepy guys who had been following them around all night.
Another chimed in: there was a guy last time she came who would not take no for an answer and started calling her ugly names when she kept refusing. Other women around us spoke up, all with similar stories.
In the end, we never made it to the dance floor. My friend, whose birthday we were celebrating, could not relax. The vibe felt off, so we took the party back to my place.
Since then, the night has played over and over in my mind. It’s left me feeling sad to think that KOKO, a venue that’s given so much music and culture to England over ten decades, even surviving a disastrous fire in 2020, hasn’t been able to keep the worst of nightlife’s characters away. Again, the question hovers: Who to blame for this? How much responsibility does a club, or any kind of venue, have for the crowd it attracts?
Why, in the beginning, did predators decide this place was one where they could do this more easily? The answer becomes clear: because of success. Because they tried it once or twice and got away with it. Because the club didn’t prevent it from happening the first time (or the first many times) and there were no repercussions.
Suddenly this felt like a story much larger than KOKO, so I had to look at the numbers across London.
After some research, I learned the data: Around 2% of UK adults, nearly one million people, said they have been a victim of drink spiking in the last year, according to new data reported by Drinkaware and Anglia Ruskin University. Sadly, only 1 in 4 of those who experienced drink spiking reported the incident to the police. When asked why, it wasn’t shame; it was simply that people couldn’t exactly remember what happened. Almost 40% gave that exact reason. How do you report something you have no memory of?
It’s a uniquely cruel outcome for anyone who’s ever experienced spiking. What do you say when you don’t know what happened to you?
“Date-rape” drugs can be odorless, colorless, and tasteless. They leave the body quickly, making them hard to detect. So, what evidence can you go to the police with?
And it wasn’t just women: there is an upward trend of male victims now making up at least a third of all spiking offenses that get reported to the police.
I wondered what happened to those who did report to the police, what outcomes their brave reporting actually generated, and here’s what surprised me most: even when people do report, the numbers are bleak. One recent UK investigation found the charge rate for reported spiking fell from 4% (1 in 25) in 2018 to just 0.23% (1 in 400) by 2022, 13 times lower than the already-low charge rate for rape.
Until this year, spiking hasn’t even been specified as its own crime. Police have been attempting prosecution under laws like the Offenses Against the Person Act of 1861, a law from the Victorian era written to persecute arsenic poisoners and those who dosed victims with deadly nightshade. Not a single sentence of that law was written with modern nightlife in mind.
In 2003, the government introduced another law, the Sexual Offenses Act of 2003, which criminalizes anyone for administering a substance to someone else, but only where sexual intent can be proven.
This year, in 2026, after nearly 50 years of people telling their friends to “mind your drink,” and after Michael Kill of the Night Time Industries Association told the government, “This has been happening for some 20 or 30 years within the industry,” the Crime and Policing Act of 2026 created the UK’s first standalone spiking offense. It covers spiking of drinks, food, and vapes, with a maximum sentence of 10 years.
There’s just one problem. The law has technically been signed into law (the final formal step for a UK bill to become law is called Royal Assent, which it has achieved), but the government hasn’t activated it yet. On the UK’s official legislation page, the spiking section still sits listed as “prospective,” with no date given for when it will take effect.
In the end, the plastic cover on my drink at KOKO did more for the problem than UK law currently does.
In this way, KOKO was taking care of its attendees the best way it knew how.
My animosity, in the end, could not be directed at KOKO; rather, it had to be directed at something more diffuse, more rampant, and ultimately more frightening because it cannot be pinned down to a single place or practice: I was angry at the men who do this.
I am angry. To take something beautiful, club culture, and turn it into a place where I have to be afraid, and where my friends have to be afraid: how dare you.
You will get your comeuppance. Laws will evolve. We will weed you out. We will get our dancefloors back.
Till then, folks, mind your drink.
Cat Lewis writes on culture, creativity, and the unseen characters of nightlife. Drawn to the subversive, quirky, and queer, her writing champions those not usually seen and tells their stories. Follow her adventures on Instagram.
Edits: Alexander Cheves
