Not long ago, it cost just £2 to put a coat or a heavily stuffed tote bag in a cloakroom on a night out. But over the course of the 2020s, that cost has increased to more than £13 in some UK venues. At the Outernet Live venue complex in London’s Soho, it costs £11 to put a bag in a large locker.
It’s £9 at east London nightclub Fold, and if you want to retrieve something, you’ll need to pay again. At north London’s Drumsheds, the UK’s biggest nightclub, they cost up to £13.20 (though they’re reusable with no extra fee). At the Warehouse Project in Manchester, large bags must be stored at a nearby Premier Inn at £11.99 per locker.
Manchester’s Co-op Live Arena has a dedicated bag storage facility which costs £15 for large bags. It’s £9.99 near the 3,000-capacity Edinburgh Playhouse and £9.90 at Testbed in Leeds. How have double-digit cloakroom costs like these been normalised?
The price rises are helping to push average spending per head on a night out from £20.95 in 2020 to £28.06 in 2026, according to Night Time Industries Association. But the reality is that consumers have now hit an affordability ceiling.” With consumers spending less on alcohol, locker systems and cloakrooms offer premises a way to make some of that money back, but, Kill says, “the consumer cannot be the industry’s financial shock absorber indefinitely”. UK storage policy changed after the 2017 attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester Arena which killed 22 people and injured more than 1,000.
It led to many venues – including the nationwide network of 18 Academy Music Group sites – banning bags over A4 size entirely and offloading them to external lockers or storage partners. In London, these are often kebab shops, restaurants and barbers. Carrie Wang, a London-based spin instructor, was buzzing to see Hot Chip at O2 Academy Brixton until she learned her near-empty tote bag had to be stored in a kebab shop round the corner.
Ahmed Khan is the owner of Kentish Delight, a kebab shop in Kentish Town. He says that in 2022, O2 Kentish Town Forum’s management asked if he had any spare space in the takeaway. At an AEW wrestling event at Wembley Arena, fans were directed to a nearby Premier Inn to stow their bags, at £10 a pop with long queues.
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