Visit here at your peril
This place is hands down, the worst music venue we've ever been to. We went last week to see Jimmy Carr and this place is a Brixton Academy disaster waiting to happen. First off, we ended up missing half an hour of the show because of how awful the queuing system is, how inept and useless the bar staff were and the complete lack of information posted. It took us an hour to get drinks, an HOUR. There were several queues for the bar area, none of them had any kind of system or staffing in place, people were pushing in, panicking at missing the show, arguing with each other over how the line just meshed together at one point, meaning several people were claiming to be 'here first' There was a women who kept running from one line to the other trying to push in and was causing all sorts of trouble and she wasn't pulled up on it once. The staff were so poorly trained that it was taking them 4 and 5 minutes to serve ONE customer, they couldn't find the drinks prices on the tills, were falling over themselves to find certain drinks, they kept running out of everything and had to turn off the pumps making it even slower. It was a shambles, there were at least a dozen people we spoke to either in the queue or at the venue that said they'd never go there again because of how bad it was. One poor guy queued at the back of us for an hour to get drinks and when he got there, he was told, sorry, we don't accept cash, it's a cashless only venue, despite there being no visible signs anywhere to state this. He literally queued with his partner for an hour for nothing because he only had cash. The prices are horrendous, you pay less at established venues like the O2 arena. The toilets are all downstairs and that's a complete free for all, it was packed, people walking into each other, falling over one another to find where they were meant to go, the toilets stank to high heaven and had liquid all over the floors, absolutely vile. Upon leaving, they had the same inept bar staff trying to herd us all through one door and shouting for people not to go through other doors where the next set of customers were queueing but this made little difference as no one was listening to them. At one point a member of the bar staff ended up chasing people out of doors they weren't meant to use to usher them back in to leave through the correct doors. It was a shambles. There were a couple of security men outside checking the occasional bag but inside, we never saw any. Imagine if something really kicked off in there, there'd be almost zero protection for anyone. This place is horrendous, somebody is going to end up getting severely hurt here or worse. It's the most inept, poorly run and amateurish venue we've ever been to and we certainly won't be going back. Don't get me wrong, I used to go here all the time when it was the Odean cinema and what they've done inside is really nice, it's been completely transformed but it's so badly run and offers little to no protection to customers that it has no business operating, something bad is going to happen here unless they change things drastically.
By Rufus