By Gilles Peterson

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This weekend as I made my way down to Broadcasting House for my 6 Music show I encountered a tense and uncomfortable energy in the air as crowds gathered under dark storm clouds.

What made this moment even more poignant was that the focus of my show was a celebration of seminal DJ and cultural agitator Chris Hill who passed away last week.

Chris perfectly encapsulated the late 70s – an era in which punk rock and club culture were being birthed against the backdrop of a similar sort of tension. The thing that made him so special was that he was a working-class DJ with an inherent grasp of diversity who loved black music so much he made it his mission to bring it to the pubs, clubs, airwaves, pop charts and record shops of England.

His impeccable taste and understanding of music, fashion, parties and what audiences wanted or didn’t yet know they wanted) – all delivered in his broad Essex accent – created a template for much of what we know today. Without him we would have no all-dayers nor weekenders. No club culture as we know it. No Brit Funk nor Acid House. No Pete Tong. No me.

So why am I writing about this?

Because it feels like now more than ever the spirit of what Chris represented is vital to our world, to our country and to London as a key multi-cultural epicentre within it.

In the 40 plus years since I put up my first pirate aerial as a South London soul boy, it has always been possible to find the places and spaces (thanks Donald Byrd!) to experiment, grow, find like-minded souls and build something together.

Whether those were the bars of South London, the Electric Ballroom, Dingwalls or the WAG Club in town, the numerous pop-up venues like the Watermans Arts Center in Brentford (where the term Acid Jazz was coined) or the warehouse parties that drove the rare groove scene and beyond – the city I came up in always seemed to find a way to allow for culture to be created, shared and spread regardless of economics, politics or, frankly, anything else.

In those pre-internet days, the ecosystem that connected these burgeoning cultural movements to a wider audience included record shops like Groove Records or City Sounds, pirate radio stations like Radio Invicta and Horizon, magazines like Black Echoes, Straight No Chaser and Groove Weekly not to mention flyers, posters and good old word of mouth.

Fast forward to today and things seemingly look very different. A mixture of changing habits combined with the cost-of-living crisis mean that people’s disposable income (particularly amongst the young) is increasingly stretched making the choice to go out potentially prohibitive. We are constantly reminded of the threat to small independent venues and clubs which are forced to close at an alarming rate depriving both budding artists and audiences from forming those vital heart bonds. A sense of terminal decline prevails.

But comparing past and present more closely, we see that while the specific challenges are different, underground culture has always had to overcome multiple obstacles to exist. Pirate stations were constantly being shut down by the DTI in a perpetual game of cat and mouse, small clubs and venues were always at the whim and mercy of licensing challenges, rising rents and, let’s face it, people’s habits and tastes have always been capricious.

Paradoxically, this constant state of flux might be one of the most enduring qualities of our city – on the one hand it disrupts but, on the other, creates an exciting dynamism that enables the emergence of the new from the cracks in the old. It just takes ideas, energy and a bit of fight to get things going and grow them to the place where they can sustain themselves and, in so doing, influence what comes next. There is still a lot of fight left amongst those of us that deeply believe in the need for these places to exist.

And this is cause to be optimistic. If we look at London, despite the challenges, there has been a notable rise in record shops, online radio stations, listening bars, self-organised cultural hubs and city-based day festivals in the past few years proving that where there is a will there is a way.

While this growth does not compensate for the challenges facing clubs and night life, it does illustrate the need for places where people can congregate around culture in a way that works for them.

Often these spaces are deeply rooted in neighbourhoods and local communities becoming nodes in a network than can then reach far beyond their postcode. Think of places like Church of Sound that saw the opportunity to create something special in the context of St James the Great in Clapton which now almost 10 years later is a mainstay of the city’s cultural landscape and provides vital exposure and financial contribution to the church itself.

This repurposing of a community space for culture outside of the traditional venue economy harkens back to those warehouse days. The circle closes and we go again.

There is also one other big difference with the past in that many of the people who now occupy positions of responsibility in our councils, institutions and the private sector grew up with an understanding of the power and importance of these cultural spaces.

Perhaps this article could serve as a call to action for any of you that fit that description with knowledge of an unused space that would benefit from creative energy and people will fill it.

So coming back to where I started this piece – and channelling the energy and passion that Chris Hill brought to everything he did – let’s keep pushing forward finding those spaces and opening them up to a broad and diverse public so we can keep the focus on putting the unity in community.

Gilles Peterson is a broadcaster, DJ, record label and festival owner