MEAT FREE // THE WHITE HOTEL // 00:00–08:00
Betwixt the smoke stacks and rotting signage of Salford’s once-proud textile belt sits a place called the White Hotel. Tucked off Dickinson Street behind roller shutters and barbed wire, it looks like somewhere you’d take a body, not a dancefloor. Corrugated roof. Uneven floor. Five steps up, three down, and one hell of a drop into the night.
We came from Liverpool. Forty-five minutes up the M62. At 1:30am, we arrive to find a queue pulsing with confusion. Security’s on edge. Cash on the door, one in, one out, no nonsense. A man at the front sees me. “Cinderella,” he says, “watch that whip.”
I smile. “It’s a riding crop.” He smirks. Then with quiet efficiency, he waved away a group of six young lads. Just like that. No reason given. A familiar privilege opens up and we’re in.
The dance floor, uneven, raised in places, invisible in others. Perfect for twisting an ankle or transcending ego. Inside, the air is soup. Curtains soaked in red light, a fog machine on overdrive, and a bar sunken into the floor like it was never meant to be found again. The DJ is playing under a staircase like rave Harry Potter.
A topless man does the communist jive. Another tells me, very seriously, the definition of “folk music.” There’s vomit in a bin. There’s a lot of man. There’s a lot of smoke.
Then the dogs arrive.
Five of them. Not real dogs, men in black neoprene hoods, each head masked, each groin cradled by another’s hands. One wears a green harness and a name tag: Clicky. I talk to him and his partner Lucas. They’re sweet, a little high, and oddly gentle. Like aliens who landed at the right rave.
I retreat to the back of the dancefloor. Visibility is ten centimetres. Perfect for fingering a stranger or becoming smoke yourself. I danced like no one was watching, not because I was liberated, but because you literally couldn’t see your hands through the smoke.
The toilets were a crime scene, graffitied in every language, surface, and mood since the dawn of Sharpies. The water in the bowl shook in time with the bass like a haunted spirit level.
By 5am, we were sat at the bar, drinking in the sunrise drizzle and chatting to Chris, a spiritual salesman with glitter in his eyes and something far stronger in his bloodstream. “This place,” he said, eyes wide, “is healing. Like… inner child healing, but with outer chaos.”
We left with grey clouds overhead, the road wet and empty. Slept in the van just outside. Woke up with chimneys in view and a sense that we’d been somewhere liminal, strange, and alive.
No photo policy. Just memories, hallucinations, and hearsay. Some things are better etched in sweat and fog than captured on a cracked iPhone screen.
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