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This Guy Wants to Turn an Abandoned Victorian Fort into 'Berghain-On-Thames'

He's only got £700,000 left to raise.
Hannah Ewens
London, GB

The abandoned Victorian fort – No 1, The Thames – in the Thames Estuary (All photos of the fort courtesy of Nigel Day)

There’s all sorts you can do with an abandoned Victorian fort in the middle of the Thames. Convert it into a retreat for people who find peace in floating detritus and stranded whales, for example, or a home for a particularly ostentatious hermit. But what really makes the most sense is to throw a bunch of speakers in there and call it a night club, because if you’re going to insist on throwing up the dregs of your overdraft every Friday night, you might as well do it off a 200-year-old hunk of concrete.

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Scottish promotions company Minival came to the same conclusion, setting up a gofundme page in the hope of raising the £750,000 they need to buy No 1, The Thames, a dilapidated fort in the Thames Estuary, just off the coast of the Isle of Grain in Medway, Kent. They want to spruce it up so it’s slightly less deathtrap-y, before opening the doors to their 24-hour party palace sometime in the next couple of years.

I spoke to one of the Minival team, Ravi Karia, about how exactly they plan on doing that.

Ravi boating down the Thames

VICE: Hi Ravi. So how did you initially come up with this idea?
Ravi Karia: I saw on BBC News that the fort was on sale, and our company does parties in very odd locations. We’ve done them on rooftops and stuff, so I thought, 'That would be an amazing place for a party. Why not buy it and turn it into a party fort?' It started off as kind of a casual thing, but it’s really picking up, so it’s looking positive.

So you didn't think people would donate when you first set up the page?
Well, we didn’t think people would really donate, to be honest. We thought it would create a bit of a hype and that people would want to get involved, but not really get involved, you know. So we’ve just found it really impressive that people really have. Now it’s taken off we’re really excited about it.

Say you reach your target – where will you go from there?
First thing would obviously be renovate the fort. I don’t know how easy that would be. We need to make it somewhat safe. From the pictures, and if you take a tour of the actual building, you’ll see it’s in a pretty bad state. So £250,000 would probably go to making it relatively safe. From there we’d be looking into further funding, because it does need a lot of work.

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How are you going to sort access to the fort?
We’ll probably do shuttle-boats. It’s half a mile away from the shore, and someone I spoke to said that three or four boats would be the best way.

Cool. The estate agent told me it’s got multiple floors, too. 
Yeah, it’s got different rooms. In winter you can hold parties inside, and then in the summer you could have parties around a pool area, which would be on the roof. There’s so much potential.

What kind of parties would you have there?
We focus primarily on house and techno. We mentioned in the description that we’d want it to be kind of like a Berghain in the middle of the sea. If you don’t know [Berghain], it’s an old industrial power plant in Berlin that’s been turned into probably the best club in the world. It’d be along those lines. We’d do drum 'n' bass, for example, then maybe have some disco in there. But, mainly, it’s electronic music that we go for, so we’d have DJs in that field playing all night.

Is it going to have the same door policy as Berghain, i.e. incredibly brutal?
Whoever donates to the fund will get to be a member for life. They’ll be able to access the fort for free. Obviously we wouldn’t be able to allow everyone in at the same time, but a membership system would mean different people could go on different days, for example, depending whether they’re on the list or not.

But will people who didn’t originally pay get to go still?
Yeah, we’d make sure there was space for regular entry to come in. We’d have to get some extra funding somehow, and obviously charging people who haven’t donated would be the way to do that.

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You say on the page you’d do 24-hour access.
Well, it depends on licensing, to be honest. We’d push for that. You can get venues in London that have 24-hour licensing, so hopefully we’d get it, do stuff during the day and then go into the evening, so it’d be full 24-hour or 48-hour events. To get that we’d have a wider window to play with.

When do you hope to get the funding?
Optimistically, in a few months, depending on how quickly this spreads and how many people like it. Yesterday the page was seen 5,000 times, but only 25-odd people donated. Our hope is that someone doesn’t get in and buy it before us, because that’s obviously another risk.

True. Finally, who's going to play the opening party?
Dixon. And I'd probably get another DJ called tINI. That’d be cool.

Okay great. Thanks, Ravi.

@hannahrosewens

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