Ghetto

Ghetto at this location closed years ago. It’s something else now. Hello Unilocal… time for an update to your database much?

And… this place is now closed. C’est la vie.

So, can we have a collective moment of silence for the original Ghetto in Soho? AND for the original Trash Palace which is now housed in the upstairs of this impostor?
SIGH.
So having been to what used to be an alternative to the glitter-​encrusted Soho bars, this downsizing has left me feeling nostalgic and empty. Ghetto is the ground floor and the upstairs is the new home for Trash Palace which used to have a lovely home off Shaftsbury. The drinks are «cheap» but ridiculously weak so I’ve found myself spending more money here on a ‘slumming it’ night and left feeling more sober than I would have at something like Fluid getting 8 – 9 pound cocktails.
The new location that edges towards Shoreditch brings with it a new level of hipster that sometimes is just too much for me to stomach. Are the mustaches so un-​ironic that they are… or so ironic that they *aren’t*. One time, some annoying guy grabbed a drink out of my friend’s hand and threw it across the room and wandered off. We were dumbfounded and furious, the bouncers told him to leave, then let him back in. Annoyed, we threw icecubes at him for the rest of the night but although throwing ice at clubs always makes me feel better, that didn’t really get the missing drink back.
Regardless, this bar only makes me want to build a time machine and go back to the old Ghetto in Soho, not the new Ghetto on Old st.

I think it will just take time to establish in a new area

Like the other reviewers of Ghetto, I was a major fan of the original Soho location– the basement down a backstreet spot gave it a certain debauched air, making it a great place for a rowdy night out. But all good things must come to an end, and as such Ghetto was moved out East to make way for the new crossrail sweeping through the capital. Someone once said a change will do you good [I think it was Shania Twain, or possibly Sheryl Crowe], but is that the case here?
Well sadly, no. The new Ghetto is fine, but the layout of the place is a bit of a shambles, with a tiny entrance way serving as the only means of access to the club, the upstairs bar, the cloakroom and outside for a cigarette, making it virtually impossible to move around past midnight. The music’s still good and the drinks are still bargain basement cheap, but it doesn’t get nearly as busy as Ghetto Soho did, and hence it’s lost the atmosphere which made it what it was. A real shame.

This soho institution, home to mother of all modern fashionista clubs, NagNagNag, recently made the move to Old Street.
We visited on a Saturday night and the place is definitely suffering from teething troubles. Previously Play, Ghetto uses both floors as a club cum bar but the layout is pretty flawed. Basically the entrance which is no bigger than a metre squared serves as an admission booth, a queue to go outside for smokers, the exit and the only way to navigate from upstairs to downstairs. Because of the residential location, security work hard to make sure there are only a few people outside smoking and that the internal and external doors aren’t both open at the same time to prevent noise escaping. So the moment you try and enter (once security are sure the internal door isn’t going to be open to let the sound from the club out) you hit chaos.
The wonderful thing about this place is that the staff are all so patient and nice — if I was working in this sort of chaos there is no way I could be like them. It’s because of their attitude alone that I didn’t leave in a bad mood.
So a cold winter night, we arrived with thick coats and needed to put them away but the coat check couldn’t accommodate all the coats so there was no option but to continue wearing our coats or hold them! Argh!
We left pretty quickly. I don’t want to give this place too much of a negative wrap as it is just it’s first week and they will inevitably have a lot of teething troubles but it feels like they’ve gone from a spacious roomy venue into somewhere much smaller and less well designed.
If you go, arrive early!