After Dark
After Dark
Diane Muldowney
After Dark is a collaborative project with Rob St John and Tommy Perman documenting Nelson’s nightlife, past and present.
My approach to this commission was to photograph, map and collect voice interviews exploring the town’s nightlife as it exists now, alongside the traces of what has disappeared. I have photographed pubs, working men’s clubs and community spaces that remain in use, as well as the ghost spaces of former nightclubs and social venues.
Through photographs, recorded conversations, personal testimony, objects and film, the project explores how people met, danced, worked, celebrated and remembered Nelson after dark.
At its heart, After Dark is about more than nightlife. It is about the social spaces in which people built relationships, communities and memories, and what happens to those histories when the buildings close and the spaces disappear.
My own connection to Nelson’s social life began with the Pennine Paths Preservation Society, known as Penpaths.
On 29 August 1930, a group of friends first met at 35 Rowland Avenue, Nelson. The society worked tirelessly to keep local footpaths open and safe for public use. Their social gatherings at the Silverman Hall continued into the 1980s.
I remember attending with my parents and reluctantly dancing the Slosh. My late father was the society’s secretary from around 1980 until the group folded in 2004.
The town named after a pub
Years later, my connection with Nelson’s nightlife became part of my photographic practice.
As a documentary photographer, I felt it was important to record the closing party at the Lord Nelson, the pub that gave the town its name. The media arrived in force, interviewing staff and customers, and the closure made national news.
For a short time, the pub reopened on Boxing Day 2024, and I photographed the event. Despite the landlady’s determination to keep it going, the Lord Nelson is now permanently closed.
The photographs became a starting point for looking more closely at what had been lost, what remained, and what was still happening after dark.
Lost nightclubs and remembered rooms
Researching Nelson’s nightlife led me to Blueberries Nightclub, which closed following an arson attack in 1999. I had danced there myself in the 1980s.
In 2025, I was permitted to photograph Pendle Rise Shopping Centre before it closed to the public. Blueberries had once existed beneath the centre, and I discovered an old back entrance down several flights of stairs.
The space was dark, empty and ghostly. Memories returned: handbag dancing, lager and black, music and crowded nights.
Twenty-six years after the fire, the damage was still visible. Much of the bar had been destroyed, the optics had melted, and the walls remained blackened. I photographed what survived of the nightclub and then set my camera to a slow exposure and danced on the charred dance floor to imaginary chart anthems.
The resulting photograph became both documentation and performance, connecting the building's physical remains with the memories of the people who once occupied it.
El Tropicano, now a private house, was another popular nightclub that closed in the early 2000s. With the owner’s permission, I photographed the exterior and one remaining interior room.
I remembered entering from the rear of the building and walking along a dark corridor towards the bar and dance floor.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a casino existed upstairs. A friend later gave me a gambling chit she had kept from the casino, providing a small physical fragment of a vanished social world.
Trax nightclub once operated beneath the Station Hotel and later featured in the final episode of the television series Juliet Bravo. The former nightclub space is now used for storage.
In May 2026, Gemma Robertson, manager of the Station Hotel, allowed us to screen the episode there. The screening brought the room’s television history into conversation with its present-day community, reconnecting a space from the past with the people who use the pub today.
Stories and voices
The voice interviews have become one of the most important parts of After Dark. They preserve memories that might otherwise disappear and reveal connections between people, places and events that are not visible in photographs.
The history of the Imperial Ballroom is particularly rich.
Ro Korol’s story connects Poland, Nelson and Northern Soul. He saw the Rolling Stones at the Imp and discovered soul music at the Twisted Wheel. Now a well-known DJ, he hosts soul nights at venues including the Municipal Hall in Colne and the Bird Trap at Walter Street Working Men’s Club in Brierfield, raising money for local charities.
Sheila McClave met her partner at the KSC, the Knights of Saint Columba, a small working men’s club that hosted regular entertainment. Her father once insisted that Alan Lancaster, founding member of Status Quo, stay at their house after performing at the Imp rather than sleep in his van following a bad experience at a local guest house.
Mick Chippendale's wife has her own claim to fame accidentally running over Tom Jones’s foot with her pram outside the Sunbeck Café.
Farida Ahmed lived opposite El Tropicano and remembers being woken by revellers leaving the club at two in the morning. Her father had come to England from abroad in the 1960s to work in the mills. He initially went to the pub to socialise and fit in with his fellow workers. A few months later, his wife joined him and put an end to his nocturnal routine.
These stories reveal another side of Nelson’s nightlife. Behind the clubs and pubs are migration stories, friendships, family histories, working lives, music, humour and chance encounters.
A Sufi night at the Brunch Corner
Not everything documented by After Dark belongs to the past.
At the Brunch Corner, I photographed a group of predominantly South Asian women enjoying a relaxed evening of art, food, culture, music and dancing.
Guest DJ Attia Shiraz played vinyl records, including music sourced during her travels through Pakistan.
The evening offered a glimpse of Nelson’s continuing social life and the different ways people create their own spaces for music, culture and connection.
Pubs and working men’s clubs
Managed by Gemma Robertson, the Station Hotel is the last remaining pub in Nelson town centre. Its jam nights, live local bands and popular Monday Club continue to draw a loyal crowd, attracting both regulars from the town and people travelling from further afield.
It remains an important social space in Nelson, keeping live music, conversation and community at the heart of the town centre.
Nine working men’s clubs remain in Nelson, most operating as members-only spaces. Once central to the town’s social life, these clubs continue to provide places for conversation, entertainment and community, while their membership-based model makes them less visible to those outside their circles.
The Short Homers Working Men’s Club, also known as the pigeon club, is a strictly men-only club run by Ben Eastwood. Its name comes from short-flight homing pigeons. An arrow on the ceiling was once spun to determine the direction in which the pigeons would be released.
Ben describes the club as a place that remains popular and is loved by many local lads.
Built for mill workers, the Warp Dressers on New Brown Street is a small, friendly members-only club.
The Carters and Motormen (Fast and Slow) is one of the larger clubs, hosting regular entertainment and bingo. When I visited, every seat was taken, so I sat on an upstairs balcony while a singer performed between rounds of bingo.
These spaces can appear ordinary from the outside, but inside they contain layers of working-class social history. They are places where rituals continue, even as many of the industries and communities that created them have changed.
The Last Night of the Tacklers
The Last Night of the Tacklers is a film showing the club packed to capacity, with people dancing, singing and celebrating. It looks like a riotous night.
John Pickles gave me the film in memory of his best friend, Glen. Like the photographs and voice recordings, it is both a document and a personal act of remembrance.
Operation Alkaline
Nelson’s nightlife also extended beyond traditional pubs and clubs.
Lomeshaye Industrial Estate hosted the last of the Blackburn illegal acid house raves, where thousands of people gathered inside a newly built warehouse. Hardcore Uproar was recorded that night.
The police arrived in force as part of Operation Alkaline to neutralise the Acid; they raided the building at 5.30 am.
Tommy Dumbarton tells his side of the story. Today he organises legal raves and raises money for charity.
The story connects Nelson and the surrounding area to the wider history of rave culture, showing another generation creating its own temporary spaces for music, freedom and collective experience.
Fragments and remembered lines
The interviews preserve the humour and disorder of live performance. When Stevie Wonder played the Imp, management reportedly told the front row to tap him on the foot if he got too close to the edge of the stage. When American singer PJ Proby appeared, he split his trousers on stage and revealed he wasn't wearing anything underneath. On occasion, when acts failed to turn up, they would call for Cilla Black, though her voice wasn’t always appreciated.
The project also reflects on endings. In On Extinction, Author, Ben Ware suggests we should embrace extinction and begin again from the end. After Dark considers what disappears when venues close, but also what remains: stories, objects, photographs, films, rituals and the memories people carry, while living memory allows.