So farewell to the Foundry

My abiding memory of The Foundry is being held aloft by my throat by the landlord, Falklands veteran and notorious band manager Alan "Gimpo" Goodrick, as he accused me of stealing a Shirley Bassey album. I had been DJing for a book reading by Mark "Zodiac Mindwarp" Manning, and there was a lot of absinthe being drunk thanks to some fellow from The Idler. I knew at that point I shouldn't have begun the evening by playing the line "there may be trouble ahead" from Bassey's version of "Let's Face the Music and Dance" over and over on a loop. It's a dreadful cliché to say knowingly of a bar "it was that kind of place", but really, it was that kind of place.

The Foundry - a shabby, squat-like bar on a busy intersection on Old Street, the gateway to east London - now appears certain to close, and soon. Demolition has been hanging over it after the building's owners announced plans to build a hotel in its place, and Hackney council last night (Wednesday) gave formal approval to these plans.

There have been many appreciations of the bar - even Newsnight saw fit to mention its passing tonight - but sadly these have mainly focused on pop cultural figureheads that have frequented it or performed there: Banksy (whose valuable paintings, which ironically the council is trying to preserve, adorn the walls among tangles of graffiti), Pete Doherty and appalling YBA chancer Gavin Turk are wheeled out again and again to emphasise its boho credentials. But those people are not what it was about. There was art there, for sure - but its policy, laid down by bar founders Gimpo (pictured) and his friend Bill Drummond of the KLF, was open, with anyone allowed to exhibit if they could put together a show and stick their name on the bar's calendar.

It was an antidote to the celebrity culture of the YBAs, and an antidote too to the gentrification of the Shoreditch area that was going on around it consistently from its mid 1990s opening. It remained resolutely tatty, and not in a chic way, either. You were more likely to find a posse of hard-drinking, hard-drugging cycle couriers or ageing punks and ravers in there than you were trust-fund-assisted "web designers" or would-be media ponces like me, and poseurs and voyeurs were not particularly welcome, although it certainly had its fair share of arseholey rock'n'roll casualties.

Its demise will be seen as symbolic of Shoreditch's transfer from enterprising artists and ravers into the hands of bankers, culture tourists and arch dilletantes, and maybe it is. But really everything about the Foundry always felt contingent, improvised, ready to fall apart and be rebuilt at any time, and the grotty, unpretty spirit of its constituency is strong - so it's hard to get sentimental about its passing, as like an infection, those who have felt its calloused fingers around their throat are sure to carry that Foundry spirit with them wherever they go for their next pint of organic bitter with an absinthe top.

More on Bill Drummond, Gimpo and Zodiac Mindwarp can be found in Bill Drummond's book, 45 (Find 45 on Amazon)