Acclaimed East London nightclub Sosho was almost burned to the ground by a huge fire this week, which started in the early hours of Thursday morning (7.15am) when nobody was on the premises.
Sosho’s sister venue the East Room (a private members club) was also destroyed in the blaze which took one hundred firefighters over 24 hours to extinguish.
"Our whole building is completely gone. It's probably structurally unsafe and I have been told that one of the walls will probably collapse,” Sosho owner Jonathan Downey told the Islington Gazette.
"It's worse than if my own house had gone up in flames. I can't just move my business to another location. We also have 50 staff - what will happen to them?” he added.
The disaster happened just months after Sosho was temporarily closed by police after a man on a motorcycle fired shots at a group of revelers standing outside the club at 5am on a Monday morning.
"We have never had trouble like this in a decade of business,” a spokesman for Sosho told the Gazette following the shooting in December “We normally have an older crowd that doesn't get into fights. This was outside our premises,” he added.
http://tinyurl.com/yct7ens (Islington Gazette, December 2009: ‘TWO 24-hour nightclubs face closure after a weekend of gun violence saw one man badly injured and another charged with attempted murder . . .’)
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