The Cornerhouse Middlesbrough – Clubbing Under the Railway Station
For a generation of Teesside clubbers, The Cornerhouse in Middlesbrough was one of those venues you didn't easily forget.
Situated at 8 Exchange Place, beside and underneath Middlesbrough railway station, the Cornerhouse occupied an unusual collection of old railway arches, rooms and passages. Long before the music started pumping through them, parts of the premises had been associated with Winterschladen & Co wine merchants, whose cellars and warehouse occupied the station buildings.
By the 1990s and 2000s, those old spaces had been transformed into something completely different — a sprawling Middlesbrough nightclub.
From Havana and Arena to Cornerhouse
The Cornerhouse had connections with two hugely important names in Middlesbrough club history: Club Havana and The Arena.
Promoter and club operator Brian Andrews had previously been involved with Club Havana and the Arena before the Cornerhouse became another part of Middlesbrough's developing nightlife scene.
These venues helped make Middlesbrough an important destination for house and dance music during the 1990s.
A Club Hidden Beneath the Station
The Cornerhouse wasn't simply one big dancefloor.
As the venue developed, it expanded further underneath the railway station into a maze of different rooms and passages.
Former resident DJ Phil Rodgers remembers the club operating with three principal areas with different resident DJs and music policies.
On busy Saturday nights around 2002, he recalls crowds approaching 1,500–1,600 people across the venue.
One of those rooms was Area2, where Rodgers held a weekly residency. He remembers it as a roughly 600-capacity space featuring contemporary furnishings, mood lighting, seating areas, plasma televisions and its own sound system.
The main room concentrated more heavily on upfront house music, while the different spaces allowed the Cornerhouse to offer different sounds during the same night.
DJs and Club Nights
There is surviving evidence of Cornerhouse DJ sets going back into the 1990s.
Archived listings preserve sets including:
Graham Robinson – Cornerhouse – 5 May 1995
Graham Robinson – Cornerhouse – 3 June 1995
Graham Robinson – Cornerhouse – 17 June 1995
DJ Mad A – Cornerhouse – 1996
Later names associated with the venue include Graeme Clark, who is documented as having been a Cornerhouse resident before becoming an Arena resident in 1994.
By the 2000s, club nights included names such as Sixty Nine, Sumo and Metropolis.
More Than a Dance Club
One of the things that makes the Cornerhouse particularly interesting is that it wasn't restricted to one type of music.
It became a nightclub, live music venue and comedy venue, and different nights attracted very different crowds.
Teesside University's history of the venue remembers the popular 69p Thursdays and the Brighton Beach indie night on Fridays.
The Cornerhouse also hosted bands before some of them became enormous.
Most notably, Coldplay and Muse are both recorded as having appeared at the venue before reaching the stadium and festival-headlining level they later achieved.
That gives the Cornerhouse a place not only in Teesside clubbing history but also in the area's live-music history.
The End of the Cornerhouse
The venue continued well into the 2000s.
Surviving event listings include Cornerhouse events through 2009, while another listing records a Visionquest event in November 2011.
The building subsequently stood empty for years. CAMRA records the Cornerhouse as closed by 2013.
Eventually, redevelopment around Middlesbrough railway station brought the story of the old venue to an end, and the former Cornerhouse building was demolished.
For people walking around the redeveloped station area today, it can be difficult to imagine hundreds — sometimes more than a thousand — clubbers once filling the rooms and railway arches underneath it.
Do You Remember The Cornerhouse?
https://weedygarageradio.xyz/forum?topic=88
This is exactly the type of Teesside nightlife history Weedy Garage Radio wants to preserve.
Were you there for 69p Thursdays?
Did you go to Brighton Beach, Sixty Nine, Sumo or Metropolis?
Did you see Coldplay, Muse or another band there before they became famous?
Or were you one of the Saturday-night clubbers moving between the different rooms until closing time?
We're particularly interested in finding original Cornerhouse flyers, photographs, membership cards, tickets, DJ tapes, CDs and recordings.
If you've still got something sitting in a drawer or an old box, it could help preserve another piece of Middlesbrough's nightlife history.
WGR – Keeping North East club, rave and music memories alive.