London Experiences Huge Rise In Illegal Underground Raves

Illegal parties are all the rave right now in London…

In a recent report, police figures reveal that the number of unlicensed raves held in abandoned buildings and warehouses has nearly doubled since 2016. Along with that comes a huge decline in the number of night clubs in the capital city.

Metropolitan police caught onto 133 unlicensed raves in 2017, up nearly 70 percent from the previous year. The vast rise in underground raves seems to be connected to steep price of cocktails and covers in the club scene, according to The Guardian. Another factor is certainly the lessened number of licensed hospitality premises, which dropped by 3% across the UK.

DJ, author and former resident at the legendary nightclub Fabric, Bill Brewster, attributes the increase of illegal parties to the pure nature of the raver lifestyle.

“A lot of young people are looking for something a little bit transgressive. I think it’s innate in teenagers and people in their early twenties to want to do stuff their not supposed to do. And even though raves are illegal, most of them don’t do much harm apart from giving a few people a poor night’s sleep.”

“In an ideal world, there would be lots of places for night clubs to open that don’t disturb the neighbours but we live in a flawed world and it’s becoming harder to throw parties in city centres.”

On the other hand, the head of crime and DCI John Oldham has some real concerns about the uprise of raves in London. “Using covert tactics, we try and understand who the organiser is and where they live. We’ve woken up to the problem and put out a much higher intelligence requirement to identify these things.”

He continues, “If you are dealing with something like drug dealing you need to put someone in to buy the drugs or to pretend to be a drug user.”

So its quite possible undercover police forces will be working their way into the rave scene as well.

Source: The Guardian