‘The scene is splintered,” Karl says, unsheathing one of his two annual cigars. “But it’s still alive.”
Milton Keynes’ Stadium MK looms overhead and bass shakes the outdoor Portaloos, as ravers like Karl return to V7 Saxon Street, once the address of the superclub Sanctuary Music Arena. Its great glass doors welcomed close to a million people between 1993 and 2004, and 20 years on, 8,500 of them have returned across two Saturdays in November for Sanctuary Forever: The Return to V7 Saxon Street, billed as the “the biggest rave reunion in history”. With sets spanning drum’n’bass, jungle, hardcore, speed garage and gabber – pierced by soaring, smoke-textured lasers and the squawk of “ravehorns” from the official merch table – it is enough for Karl to be “literally transported back to the early 90s”.
The story of V7 Saxon Street is a microcosm of 35 years of UK rave, as it moved from disused warehouses to legal superclubs, redevelopment, and now nostalgic reunions. “The Sanctuary was just that: a sanctuary,” says Emma Hope Allwood, curator of the 2021 exhibition The Unlikely Home of British Rave, which examined the club’s place in UK dance culture. “A place of pilgrimage for ravers from across the country, where they found freedom.”
Before Sanctuary, parties in 1980s Milton Keynes are remembered as stuffy, violent, or boring: esteemed house DJ Eddie Richards remembered being turned away from Rayzels in nearby Bletchley because his socks were the wrong colour. So MK’s serious dance music fans rejected mainstream clubbing, and the squat party era began. “There used to be a lot of abandoned buildings so someone would set up a sound system,” remembers former squat raver Gemma. “It was always word of mouth, that’s really what the rave scene was – underground and wild.”
But as public and police scrutiny intensified, so too did the need for legal parties. In 1991 a promoter called Murray Beetson approached MK council to license a rave at an empty warehouse on V7 Saxon Street in Denbigh North, built in 1990 but never fulfilling its intended industrial use.
The four subsequent Dreamscapes events held there between late 1991 and mid-1992 “go down in history” in British rave mythology, says Allwood. Playing amid innovations such as inflatables and dance platforms, DJs represented the cutting-edge of UK hardcore, acid house and drum’n’bass (including LTJ Bukem and Grooverider). Sensing an opportunity, businessman Tony Rosenberg then found a financier to purchase the site and turn what he calls “a tin box with a load of fire exits knocked in”, also featuring a set of faux-Roman columns mysteriously left over by the previous tenants, into one of the first of its kind: a permanent rave venue with an all-night entertainment licence.
The first event, Jungle Fever in early 1993, went off without a hitch; the second, reggae event World Cup Sound Clash, Rosenberg remembers as an “absolute riot”, as thousands of people descended on the venue.
Over the next 11 years, the Sanctuary would go on to inscribe itself into UK music history by hosting Dreamscapes until Beetson’s death aged 29 in 1996, as well as major promoters such as Helter Skelter, Fantazia, Obsession, Slammin’ Vinyl and Hardcore Heaven; house nights including Gatecrasher, Godskitchen, and IQ; and live acts such as the Prodigy. It incorporated a neighbouring roller-skating rink and go-karting track as extra dance arenas to become a 9,000-capacity multi-stage supervenue. “The Sanctuary was the greatest venue in the UK,” says Richard, one of the original ravers. “7pm til 7am. I would do it all over again in a heartbeat.”
Around 2001, as the night Sidewinder moved from Northampton to MK and new darker, harder garage was forced out of London, the Sanctuary hosted MCs including Wiley, Tinchy Stryder, and a 16-year-old Dizzee Rascal who had to be escorted to and from the stage by security. It was “incontrovertibly”, dance music historian Emma Warren writes, “the birthplace of grime”.
The Sanctuary and its iconic columns are sometimes represented as a dark, brutal place. On Facebook, I see a veteran MC post a selfie at the Colosseum in Rome, wondering about “the bloodshed inside there”, and someone – perhaps joking, perhaps not – comments underneath: “Nothing compared to the Sanctuary, brother.” The floor was known to bounce in the smaller room upstairs, and locals who preferred house nights in town adopted the sarcastic nickname “Sanitary” owing to the sweat dripping from the ceiling.
For others the Sanctuary was quirky and friendly, with a team misting people with water to keep them cool, and one raver regularly arriving in a mirrored suit to reflect lasers – a human disco ball. “Blokes who might usually go out and have a fight on Saturday night would all come together,” Gemma says. “Get off their boxes and dance ’til the sun.” There were some, Allwood believes, for whom “it was even a kind of paradise, where people found belonging amid the pounding bass”.
The Sanctuary was the centre of a nationwide system where promoters would send tickets to a network of independent record stores, who would sell them on to partygoers together with a return coach ticket. Rosenberg remembers hundreds of hopeful promoters handing flyers to the thousands filing out at 6am, leaving behind “a carpet of millions of multicoloured scraps of paper”. The club indirectly influenced bouncer regulation after a bill was proposed by its then-local MP in 1998, and its outdoor area, complete with burger vans, was groundbreaking pre-smoking ban.
But come 2004, the area was in line for redevelopment, including a furniture superstore and a much-maligned new location for Wimbledon FC, renamed Milton Keynes Dons. On 10 July, the Sanctuary hosted its final event. “We didn’t get closed by the police,” Rosenberg says, “but by Ikea, MK Dons and the property deal.”
Today, the reunion event is being held in the Marshall Arena, behind Stadium MK. The idea came from Aimran Majid, AKA early British-Asian MC Magika; more artists came on board, and they approached MK events company Project One-X. “I think it was a surprise to everyone,” says Oliver Ibrahim from the company. “It just absolutely exploded.” After the first event sold out, they put together another the following week “to make sure everyone had access to it. A core audience hadn’t been out raving for years, it felt like it was their chance to come together again.”
This isn’t the first time the spirit of the Sanctuary has been evoked here – the textiles section of Ikea was taken over by a flashmob in 2008 – and neither will it be the last: tickets are already half-sold-out for next November’s rerun, and an unrelated Sanctuary Reunion Rave is taking place in February elsewhere in the city. Nor is it an attempt to inject new life into MK’s dance scene – if so, the organisers might have included some spiritual successors to the Sanctuary in the lineup, and maybe more than two female DJs out of 64.
But for many, the nostalgia is potent. “The music is wicked,” says one raver, “especially in the Technodrome upstairs.” The organisers have tried to replicate the bounce in the floor, and the sweat on the ceiling, too: “It’s almost like being back.” For another, “the main thing is the love and energy around the place. The mix of old and young, the stories being exchanged with the grey-haired contingency about the fact the Marshall Arena is so similar to the old Sanctuary.” One group organised a coach from Great Yarmouth; another came from Germany after the event was shared by Berlin techno DJ Tanith.
There is melancholy, too, for something irrecoverable. Before the closing set each night, the kaleidoscopic projections above the stage are replaced by a montage of the scene’s “fallen soldiers”: DJs, MCs and promoters who have died since the Sanctuary closed. Are these euphoric reunions, or memorials, headstones, marking the Sanctuary’s return to the underground it came from?
“I don’t think anything will ever come close to the 90s rave scene,” Karl says. “I wish you could have been there to see it.” But he has travelled from Cornwall especially, and by now has a second cigar between his teeth – his annual quota in one night. Maybe after all, as Ibrahim puts it, from squat parties to the Sanctuary, Ikea to the Marshall Arena, V7 Saxon Street is “a magic little patch of land that everyone just wants to dance on”.
