Draft:The White Hotel (arts venue)

The White Hotel is an independent arts and music venue and nightclub in Salford, England. It was founded in 2016 in an industrial unit that was previously a vehicle repair garage and is located in the shadow of HMP Manchester.

It was born out of illegal arts events hosted in an adjacent space known as The Bunker that was associated with the Manchester based SWAYS record label.

The venue takes its name from DM Thomas’ 1981 novel of Freudian erotic fantasy.

It has built an enviable reputation for revitalizing Manchester’s nightlife, its community driven approach acting as a hub for experimental music scenes and its anarchistic approach to conventional commercialism..

It has generated praise across a broad spectrum of news and cultural online and print media. The Face magazine has called The White Hotel ‘the UK’s best underground club’, Vice magazine said ‘Salford was the hottest place in the UK to party right now’ , Alan Davey the Controller of BBC Radio 3 talking to BBC Music Magazine described the venue as “the atmospheric home of exploratory music of all kinds” and Michel Gaubert the Head of Music at Chanel said the following to British Vogue magazine “The White Hotel. That’s where everything is happening. That’s where you should go. It’s in Salford. It used to be a garage, and then it was turned into a club. It’s very derelict, it’s not a glamorous place, but it has so much energy to it, and they have lots of cool people coming to play there. It’s quite impressive”.

Artists and musicians that are frequently associated with the venue include Afrodeutsche, Blackhaine, Iceboy Violet, Space Afrika, Rainy Miller, Austin Collings and Manchester Collective.

The venue also generates and self-produces its own idiosyncratic arts productions, most notably its Salford and Gomorrah music series and its Art of Crime series; spanning film, art installations, film and talks that explores work that blurs the boundaries between art and criminality.

The White Hotel has a history of not shying away from the risk of public controversy as a consequence of exercising its artistic freedoms. In 2018 the venue staged a word for word re-enactment of the funeral of Diana Princess of Wales, complete with funeral procession and a Mexican Mariachi band performing Elton John’s Candle In The Wind that was castigated as ‘sick and twisted’ across numerous British mainstream tabloid newspapers. In 2023 the venue staged the theatre production Being Purple Aki, a one woman show based on a regionally infamous North West of England character Akinwale Arobieke.

HEAD II is The White Hotel’s subsidiary record label that was founded in 2020 and takes its name from a painting by the artist Francis Bacon. In 2021 HEAD II released Blackhaine’s 'And Salford Falls Apart’ record and Rainy Miller’s 'Desquamation (Fire.Burn.Nobody)' record in 2022. Later that year Blackhaine was voted Mixmag’s Live Act of The Year and Rainy Miller’s record was chosen in BBC 6 Music, Crack magazine and Dazed magazine's Album of the Year lists.

In 2021 the team behind The White Hotel opened a sister site, Peste, a bar, bookshop and event space in New Cross, Manchester, England