UNLOCKED Shoreditch: A Winning Formula for Grassroots Venues

Independently run venues, especially if they’re below a certain capacity, have never been harder to operate. Always a low- to no-margin business, the grassroots sector is particularly struggling in the current economy, where inflated prices, artists who need to make a living somehow, and fans who cannot pay any price for a ticket all need to be taken into account by venue operators and show promoters.

Sonny Hall and his team at UNLOCKED seem to have found a formula that works by creating what Hall describes to Pollstar as “a hybrid cultural platform, instead of a single-purpose venue.”

The team’s flagship project is UNLOCKED Shoreditch, a three-story, multi-purpose event space in a derelict warehouse located in one of London’s coolest and most popular areas: Shoreditch.

Says Hall, “Culture everywhere is very multi-format and collaborative at the moment. You’ve got industries working together that never did in the past. There is no creative boundary anymore, and we wanted to launch a venue that reflects that. We launched a blank canvas, everyone else is the content.”

The brand name, UNLOCKED, is meant to emphasize this business philosophy of unlocking space for others to come in and realize their vision.

“We are a constant, yet ever-changing space,” Hall explains, “you might have a free exhibition during the week, which takes over the whole building. Come Friday the exhibition leaves, and the room will be flipped into a ticketed DJ gig, and by Sunday, London Fashion Week could be doing a runway show. The program that goes on here is really wild, and the only reason we can pull it off is by being a really hungry team that does a lot of the stuff in-house.”

Hungry, and proactive one might add. By not limiting oneself to a certain type of usage you remain flexible, sure. The flip-side is that you need to be aware of what’s going on inside all industries that could become potential clients at all times.

“Luckily,” says Hall, “the building has multiple floors. We look at a year, we break it down, and log the key dates for all the different industries from brands like Fashion Week to artists coming through on tour. We then build around those main events across different industries, and then work out our diary, and how we can optimize the building utilization as much as possible.”

Hall acknowledges that running a venue that’s focused on just music is “extremely difficult, if not impossible at the moment. Bills are monthly, and shows are just on Friday and Saturday, so we need to optimize the time and space we have. That’s just stating the obvious. And I’m very optimistic that if you build a platform that’s open minded enough, and a team that’s hungry enough, it can really grow. There’s a lot of untapped revenue streams within any space, especially in major cities.”

The layout of UNLOCKED Shoreditch, with rooms spread across four floors, helps with building a profile for a diverse range of events. The basement got a thorough acoustic treatment, meaning that’s where the music events will take place.

It’s also modular, so it can be dismantled fast, which is necessary when a brand for instance decides it wants to take over the entire building for an activation.

“We are truly modular as a venue. The basement is 900 capacity, but we’ve designed a bar system that pushes back all the way. If you bring it forward, you can have a 300 to 400-cap space, that still feels really good. It’s such a massive point to be flexible in today’s day and age. Promoters obviously love it, because they can try new artists with us, where the customer doesn’t have the uncomfortable sensation of standing in a massive empty room all night,” Hall explains.

When all floors of UNLOCKED Shoreditch are in use, the venue can welcome around 1,400 guests.

It becomes clear that Hall and his team didn’t reinvent the wheel. They’re just better steerers. “If you can be as open minded as possible and not put yourself in any lane, as long as it’s culturally relevant and cool, we don’t care. We don’t mind if you want to be a pop-up shop one day, do a brand activation the next, and a show the day after – everything falls under the same creative bubble right now.”

Managing an event calendar like that is “obviously complicated,” Hall continues. Different industries work on different timelines, managing the diary is even harder than it is when you’ve just got to focus on music. “It’s not for the faint hearted,” says Hall, “but if you’re up for the challenge and you’re passionate, I think it’s achievable.”

UNLOCKED Shoreditch had been on the market as an unused warehouse space for years, when Hall and his team came in. He recalls the property looking like something out of The Chronicles of Narnia, with vines growing all over the place, and an old swimming pool filled with six inches of rainwater seeping through the various cracks in the building.

“We were a comparatively small event operator, so it took a lot to convince the landlord to give us the keys. My personal approach has always been to first just jump out the plane, and then build the parachute, which is my favorite quote ever. So we went over there, we saw the place, we all shared the vision, and immediately got stupidly busy. I now joke with the landlord about how we booked shows and took deposits in a space we didn’t even have the lease for yet, and used that money to fund the build out. But it got us to that critical stage where we’d kind of proven the concept and were able to drum up a load of business.”

Today, UNLOCKED Shoreditch will operate as a b2b venue during the week, when brands, partners, investors mostly hold their activations, pop-ups, and more. The weekend, Friday and Saturday at least, are for shows. “That’s the aim,” Hall clarifies, “but in reality, we might have an exhibition take over for three months in summer, and we don’t do a show. That’s the winning formula: to program correctly from across both sides of the business.”

The biggest brands in the world have hosted events at UNLOCKED Shoreditch, from Nike to Fifa to Boiler Room, which comes to the London venue regularly. “It’s been an insane first year, very stressful, but incredible. It already feels like we’ve worked with everyone in year one,” he says.

Looking back, the number one reason Hall was able to pull off his bold vision for a diverse event space was getting the founding team right. “I was lucky to find the first five members of the team, who were fully invested in the project,” he recalls.

The second factor was “a good set of contacts. You need to leverage your friends in the industry and call in some favors, unless you’ve got an amazing CV, which I didn’t have. We really fostered relationships early on, and made sure that if someone gave us a chance, we delivered perfectly, and made sure they benefitted from booking us. All those little relationships add up, and end up forming your foundation.”

Hall’s team comprised 15 core staff at the time of this writing, with “God knows how many freelancers and contractors coming on board for individual events,” according to Hall, who revealed that the team was already taking on their next challenge: a 5,000-capacity, 45,000 square-feet empty warehouse space in Miami, FL, scheduled to launch at the end of summer, and called UNLOCKED Wynwood

“It’s obviously a considerable jump, but it’s too perfect to let go,” he explains, adding “we’ve already got a big electronic music program and some flagship international events already lineup. It’s very much the same story as Shoreditch, where we’ve booked everything before we even had the lease. It’s really exciting for us as a small business to go straight into America.”

The business model will be the same: a hybrid approach and programming. “We don’t think anywhere is viable as a standalone music venue right now, sadly, may I add, and we think that keeping an open format, being able to take a different variety of activation and content is the winning piece.

“It allows you to be even more selective with your shows, instead of going down the slippery slope of starting very high and then gradually having to take the less appealing shows. Where I think other venues are making a mistake is when they do these unsustainable hype launches, that are impossible to follow-up. We’ve taken the opposite approach, building momentum slowly and steadily. We never even had an opening day, just so there wouldn’t be any pressure. You’ve not revealed your cards, and you’re building something that’s sustainable, instead of coming into the market with all the hype only to watch that moment drop off a cliff. It’s very hard to keep that level of excitement, and I think it’s setting yourself up for failure.”

Subscribe to Pollstar HERE

_Originally reported by [Pollstar](https://news.pollstar.com/2026/05/11/making-grassroots-work-unlocked-shoreditch-has-found-the-formula/)._