SCUMTEK — amerizm

AMERIZM CO.
PHOTOGRAPHER
GRAPHIC DESIGNER
ART DIRECTOR
BASED IN ENGLAND
UNITED KINGDOM.

Scumtek, London Squat Rave (2015).

A Collection of photos from an illegal squat rave I attended in London in the summer of 2015.

I was already in London on a random spontaneous mission at the time with no money, clothes or film and a friend was putting me up. Originally I was only meant to be staying the night, which inevitably ended up turning into a week. On the 3rd or 4th day, we ventured into Harrow to get some film developed and met up with a friends friend after getting the film done we just happened to be lurking about, when he mentioned something about a squat rave which was going on that night, so I said let's go.
To be honest I didn’t think we would end up going at all but, to my surprise, everyone was on it so we headed back to my friend's house where more of his friends started arriving. We ate some food, sorted the cameras out and grabbed some film ready for the evening. I had never experienced a real illegal rave, so I was very excited at this point and just wanted to get going.

Finally, the time had come to venture out and try and find this place, once they let the phone number out with hints as to where it may be. So we started walking and jumping tubes across London trying to figure it out, after a couple of hours we seemed to be on the right track.. slowly we noticed more ravers congregating, the tube stations were a flock of half cut polo dressed wreck heads, and we knew we were heading the right way.

We decided to follow the crowd and let them take us as nobody had a clue i think everyone had the same idea in mind, and we all ended up standing outside Park Royal station for about twenty minutes. Everyone was asking each other if they knew where it was and all you could hear were phone conversations and people moaning until somebody shouted "It's down here!" so we all started walking not knowing what was going on or even if we were in the right place or direction, we all slowly started to drift along this long road.

Around 10 minutes into the walk everyone seemed to get quite excited and pointed at this huge brand new-looking warehouse which I didn’t think much of like, surely it can’t be there but this is London I suppose so I remained hopeful. To my surprise as we got closer everybody was still quite confused, we noticed a heavy police presence at the entrance, sirens, police dogs, and officers plotted everywhere. I noticed a few police officers talking to somebody behind the gate of the building and I genuinely thought we had been led on and the owners had reported loads of people throughout the night, lingering around hesitantly we quickly decided this wasn’t any rave at all, but we all proceeded confused and glided straight past them as if we were supposed to be there not knowing where we were walking to. We walked into a huge gated-off car park tucked around the side of the warehouse, Police followed behind rounding us up like a heard of sheep asking us what we were doing here and what we were looking for, to which we just started abusing them saying we needed a piss and laughing they responded with “what all of you”.

At this point, I don’t think anyone thought it was going to happen at least I didn’t, all of us stood on the side road at the front of the building being nosey as to what the police were doing around the gates. More and more people started gathering now and we had built up quite a force, some people were walking straight past as they looked down the road thinking it had been landed on and was a no-go. After a short while a small amount of us drifted back up the road, heads down deflated and let down. Then all of a sudden some guy jumped out of a hedge from behind an acidic den of a caravan whispering "Quick over here follow me". Everyone had a snide look around getting a slightly quicker step on to get out of sight and as soon as I had turned the corner everybody started running and I found myself clasping onto my camera strap and chasing the crowd looking back as I was running to see how far the police and dogs were away from me. I could not stop laughing, we had to run the length of the building before getting to this little fire exit door and around the other side where a man was standing shouting “No police, in quick, quick, in’.

Now we're in, and trying to process what just happened whilst walking through the first room which was huge and in complete darkness following the silhouettes of the firm of people in front of me. Blue lights were beaming in as the lights flashed through the windows creating a quite surreal gritty look in the room, my first contact with an illegal rave and I immediately knew what it was all about. We went through a set of double doors where now we had light and then another set of doors. As we walked through them I couldn’t explain the feeling I felt as I looked into a ridiculous-sized room, empty apart from about 8 lorries which didn’t have any impact on the size. People were unloading and shifting equipment from the lorries, dogs running around freely, and big groups of people setting up sound systems, whilst small groups of people were sitting with chairs already partying in a festival-like manor, it was nuts. People flooded the room and began to find a little space on the floor to sit with their friends and wait till it was all set up and everyone had begun the evening. I couldn’t contain myself enough to sit down and wait so I started to look around with my friends, we found a kitchen with a pot of curry on the cooker which led to another room where we found security uniform and cameras. Later on, we found out that the security had been tricked into coming outside the gates and then locked out which is why the police were there earlier on.

As we were looking around this room pissing around with the security guys belongings, out of nowhere a kid came running through with a huge set of keys throwing the keys around and shouting "Open all the doors, open everything!" this is when I realised this isn’t going to be any ordinary rave and I got hopeful about how the night was going to unfold.

We proceeded to have a look around and found a set of stairs went up another stairs and on the 2nd floor a huge room opened up right in front of us leading onto about 12 little glass rooms all facing out towards the main room.
Up another flight to the 3rd floor, we found another room which was the same with a narrow corridor and vaults, on a whole it was nuts, with rooms leading to rooms and then more rooms 3 stories high. So we came back downstairs to the main room and waited it out.
Slowly the sound systems went up and more lorries were been sneaked in through the delivery shutters by this point, a huge amount of people had arrived, dodging police and getting in through any door or gap possible. Not long after this the light went off and music began to play, the Sealy bags opened up, cans cracked and everyone was starting the bounce.
Then the fun started as I just bopped from set to set all genres integrated. The experience upstairs had now turned into what only I can describe as a k hole, with groups of people lying all over the place, empty baggies, balloons and needles. People were fu**ing left right and centre, the ket kids had made a k hole den for you to fester in on the 3rd floor, and fully grown men were injecting heroin and smoking crack off the pipe in the little rooms on the 2nd floor. I tried to take a shot of a dimly lit man slouched on the floor, knees to chin, burning his pipe but as I approached he flipped out on a mad one and chased me out of the room, however, I remained fascinated and glad to be experiencing a real rave.
A real dirty free-for-the-people rave. I decided I needed something to carry me through so I managed to get my hands on a UPS pill.

After about half an hour I was pleasantly wavy and was very content with where I was, everywhere you looked there was something different going on, at one point police had gained entry and they were quickly surrounded by twisted sweat-soaked ravers and marched out the party, literally marched out the rave straight out the door past the bbq and back out the gates. That did make me laugh watching the police being escorted out by us, after that we all joined together and started banging the windows and pulling moonies at police who were stood breathing distance away from the window with rave cameras and lights being shined into our eyes.

The rest of the night was history for me as I spent the remainder of the night clutching to my pockets making sure I hadn't lost my film but yet still pilled out my nut hoping I hadn't lost my mind to the sound of gabba.

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