Saving Matchstick Piehouse: A Plea To Preserve Iconic Venue
Exploring the heartbreaking closure threatening a unique anti-capitalist haven.
It’s a Wednesday night, your stomach is full of cheap, buttery pie, and South-London’s jazz collective ‘Steam Down’ are guiding you through a musical meditation. As the brass hits a crescendo, you know exactly why Caleb Azumah Nelson references this in his best-selling novel ‘Open Water’ as a night where all inhibitions break loose and the cruel, hard world is obliterated by a mass of writhing, sweating dancers.
It’s a Friday night, and you are yelling and whooping at a queer cabaret, knowing some of these drag performers will go on to master the art for the rest of their life. You share the birth of their passion with the strangers-turned-family in this very room. There will be naked bodies, technical difficulties, laughter to the point of hysteria.
It’s a Tuesday night, and unspilled tears are collecting in your lashes, brought on by the spoken word read aloud from a notebook, words in ink still drying. You’ve never heard your experience so beautifully translated - you’ll speak to the poet afterwards, buy her a cheap pint, and before the nights’ end you’ll have a new friend for life.
The connecting thread through these endlessly colourful, queer and honest experiences is Depftord’s ‘Matchstick Piehouse’, a community-oriented, anti-capitalist venue and arts space dedicated to unconventional and uninhibited creation. It is not profit-driven, and was established in 2018 entirely from volunteers. This beloved venue is one of the last authentic places in the capital where failure is explored and celebrated, where art is birthed in the queue for the toilet. Who are we really without venues like this, and what does it say about our society when they fall under threat so quickly?
At the end of November, Piehouse made the difficult decision to close its doors after bailiffs turned up at their property. Due mainly to COVID-related rent arrears, their landlord was threatening to end the venue's lease should they not produce a whopping £35,000 by the end of the week. Panicked, the piehouse family turned to the public to look for support. Despite the happy extension of this deadline and the overwhelming online support, the venue has been tirelessly fundraising to ensure this important community can keep on swimming. Some of the fundraising events include shows from London queer collective Queer House Party at Hackney’s ‘Colour Factory’, and gatherings at ‘The Ivy House’ and ‘The George Tavern’. Take a look at the line up below, cancel your plans, and show up for what feels like the last of community and comradery threatened by profit-driven greed.
As one of the expansive pie-house family puts it in the fund-raiser video below: ‘everyone is one, everyone is together, everyone is seen and heard’. Please find the fundraising link here: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/keep-matchstick-piehouse-open
To donate anything you can and keep up-to-date with the mission at their instagram, @matchstickpiehouse. Long live the piehouse!