radial officially opens in Tottenham this weekend with a room built around listening rather than sheer capacity. The new venue at 39b Markfield Road holds around 250 people standing and centres its main floor on a custom 10-point sound system. Its acoustics were designed by Nick Whitaker, whose work on Plastic People remains part of London club folklore for very good reason.
A small room with an unusually serious approach to sound
radial sits inside the wider Ten87 Studios complex, a network of recording spaces that has been operating in Tottenham for years. The new venue takes that studio mentality into a public room: treated acoustics, controlled speaker placement, in-house CDJs and vinyl decks, a rotary mixer and a layout that can switch between club nights, live sets, talks and focused listening sessions.
The 10-point system is the headline feature, but speaker count alone does not tell you whether a room sounds good. The interesting name is Whitaker. His tuning of Plastic People helped make a tiny London basement into a reference point for DJs, producers and people who simply cared about hearing records properly. radial is a different room with different architecture, yet the same attention to coverage and treatment gives it a strong starting point.
The launch weekend moves from club hours into Sunday listening
The official launch begins on Saturday 5 September with Elena Colombi, Serenda, Shy One, L0-Low, Eula and a special guest, running from 19:00 until 05:00. Sunday shifts the timetable to noon–midnight with Mixtress, L-Vis 1990, Dean Bryce, Sooyeon, MJK, Klose One, Cicely, Karlie Marx and another secret guest.
That two-day split gives a decent picture of what the venue is aiming for. Saturday can lean into the proper club test — full room, low light, people dancing until breakfast starts sounding reasonable — while Sunday leaves room for slower pacing and longer listening. The venue also has flexible Japanese-style floor seating for seated formats, so future programming does not have to pretend every piece of electronic music needs a peak-time dancefloor.
Tottenham already has the studio community around it
Ten87 has grown into a substantial music-production community across north London, with dozens of studios used by independent artists, producers and larger projects. radial draws directly from that ecosystem rather than appearing as a standalone nightlife concept dropped into the neighbourhood. That connection should help with live electronics, workshops and artist-led events where having technical people nearby is more useful than another VIP booth.
The room itself is compact: around 1,000 square feet for the main event space, with a separate bar and green room. At 250 standing, it sits in the zone where a good system can feel properly physical without turning the night into crowd logistics. London has enough large rooms. A carefully tuned small one is welcome.
The first autumn programme is already filling up
September continues with live and club-focused events after the opening weekend, and the venue’s calendar already stretches into October. The programming points towards techno, dub, bass, house and more experimental electronic work without locking the room to one crowd. That variety makes sense for a venue built inside a studio complex, where the useful question is what the sound system can reveal rather than which genre logo belongs on the door.
radial has already hosted a handful of preview events, so this weekend is an official launch rather than the first time anyone has played a record in the room. Still, 5 September marks the start of its public programme in earnest. If London really does need another venue — and it always seems to lose one just as another arrives — a 250-capacity space obsessing over sound is a pretty good argument for saying yes.
THE CONVERSATION
Opinions, context and replies from the AT-DJ community.