READ
WHEN HANNAH STOPPED POSTING ON INSTAGRAM HER FOLLOWERS BECAME A LITTLE CONCERNED
She wasn’t a megainfluencer by any stretch of the imagination, but since becoming a personal trainer in 2018, the 26-year-old had built a loyal following of 15,000 or so with her sunny home-workout videos and healthy microwaveable recipes. The last picture before her hiatus, posted at the beginning of June this year, was of the view from her bedroom window – a vast blue sky and the empty streets of her hometown below. The caption is just one emoji, a broken heart, no words. In the weeks after that picture went up, her followers posted questions and speculated in the comments about what could have happened to Hannah.“Are you OK, lovely?” asks one person – the question has 100 likes. Further down, another follower wonders whether Hannah might be ill. “Hope she pulls through,” someone replies.“We all miss you,” a third person chimes in.
But Hannah was not ill. In May, her grandmother passed away after contracting COVID-19. “I was grieving,” she tells me.“I wasn’t processing anything at all. It was like grief burned away a layer of my skin. I was so raw, all I could do was react. I couldn’t think properly at all.” She runs a hand through her honey-blonde hair and her body folds in on itself, shoulders curling protectively. “I guess I just wanted to forget.” Away from the glare of social media, Hannah had found her way of coping. It wasn’t through guided meditation or speaking to her local therapist, but rather in warehouses and under bridges, dancing for hours with hundreds of strangers. Her comfort was found by getting lost in a crowd, at the exact moment when being in a crowd was the last thing she should have been doing. In fact, by June – almost six months after the outbreak of COVID-19 in the UK – multiple news reports and studies had confirmed that enclosed crowded spaces posed the greatest risk for infection. But the more Hannah lost herself to this underground world of reckless abandon, the more the thoughts of a killer pandemic, of sickness and death, seemed to fade into the background. “Doing something risky made me feel like I was part of the world again.” The parties, she says, were like her lifeline.
Real hedonism
It was around four years ago that I went to my first unlicensed party, held in an abandoned warehouse in north London. Once you were accepted into the right secret Facebook groups (you’d needed a friend who was already in one to add you), it was pretty easy to find out dates and times. The venues were always strictly guarded secrets until the day of the event. One organiser used handdrawn maps, uploaded an hour before the start-time, to let attendees know where they should go. Another posted the address
on Instagram for an hour each day in the week leading up to the party. They were nowhere near as big or illustrious as the ones held in rave culture’s heyday in the ’80s and ’90s – the sound systems were a little rickety and it would be more like 200 than 2,000 revellers. Still, they were a more hedonistic experience than paying £20 to get into one of the capital’s identikit nightclubs. The thing is, these sorts of parties have been happening for years without much fanfare (one organiser even told me that he was in weekly contact with the local council). But in 2020, as the country went into lockdown, they went stratospheric – both in terms of their size and the media and police attention they garnered. And when the people started dancing, it seemed like they had no intention of stopping.
One of the largest gatherings happened in Manchester back in June, when around 4,000 people descended on Daisy Nook Country Park in Oldham for a “quarantine rave”. That same night a further 2,000 gathered in nearby Carrington. A month later, 3,000 people headed to a former RAF airfield near Bath – the local police officers called in reinforcements from neighbouring counties but were powerless to stop the ravers, most of whom danced until the next morning. In August, the government announced tougher measures in a bid to stem the rising tide of illegal raves – with organisers facing a potential £10,000 fine. But rather than stop, anyone familiar with the scene knows that the organisers just got better at hiding…
The hard sell
All her life, Selena* had been surrounded by people. First, as the middle one of five siblings and then living in house shares, always with four or five others. In February the 29-year-old decided to make a change – and got a flat by herself. By March she was on furlough and in lockdown.“I’d been really excited about getting my own place, but when we went into lockdown it was pretty depressing. I was just really lonely,” she says. “I did the Zoom quizzes and my daily walk, but it was hard not having any kind of human contact.”
It was a chance encounter with a neighbour as she locked her bike up one evening that changed everything.“I got talking to a girl in my block and, like me, she was on her own. We thought since we were both alone, it wouldn’t be so bad if we had dinner together.” Selena’s neighbour turned out to be friends with the organisers of some local unlicensed parties. Selena had been a regular at these events for years but, like most people, when lockdown hit she assumed that parties would be put on hold along with everything else.
After a few weeks, her neighbour invited Selena to an illegal gathering in a nearby woodland.“I was definitely wary at first,” she tells me.“I was like, ‘This sounds pretty dangerous.’ It was April, and the COVID death toll was still climbing.” What eventually persuaded her, though, was the idea that she’d still be able to maintain a safe distance from most revellers.“I thought,‘It’s outdoors, so it’s probably not that different to being in a park.’”
A week later, she found herself trooping down an old railway line and into a quiet nearby woodland. “I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t amazing. The music wasn’t that loud, so I never thought we’d be discovered, and it was easy to keep a good distance from other people. There were probably around 300 of us there and the organisers had taped hand sanitiser to the trees and had people dressed in fetish gear handing out paper masks. That will be one of my lasting memories – a woman in a latex fetish harness telling me to put my mask on properly,” she laughs. “After that, I was sold.”
A lost generation
To understand why her nan’s death had hit her so hard, you’d have to go way back to when Hannah was just three days old – a tiny, trembling baby whose high-pitched yowls cut through the maternity ward in a way that led doctors to suspect Hannah’s mum had been using drugs during her pregnancy.“I had what’s called neonatal abstinence syndrome,” she explains.“I would have been taken into care if my nan hadn’t come to the hospital and refused to leave me that day.” From that moment on, her nan
›
was her closest friend and biggest supporter. In the dark days after her grandmother’s death, Hannah’s friends rallied round her but, with few distractions, she found it difficult to keep the grief at bay. When her friend invited her to an upcoming rave, she felt like she had little else to lose.“The first was in a motorway underpass,” she says. “There was no social distancing, people were just crushed in together. I didn’t care at that point. There was a makeshift bar where they were selling laughing-gas balloons as well as cans of beer. It felt a bit like being in a nightclub – a really dirty, dark one.” As the night wore on, she felt herself lighten.“At one point I just remember hugging this random man and thinking,‘F*ck this virus.’ And then I just started crying. I can’t explain it, it was just a huge relief, I guess. I didn’t do drugs, but the atmosphere was so positive that I left on a massive high.”
Selena left the first party feeling more positive than she had since lockdown had begun too.“You don’t hear about how these parties really helped some people. It was all about ‘stupid kids endangering lives just for the sake of a party.’ But I honestly believe some people needed that outlet. I don’t know what I’d have done without it.”
For 22-year-old Rachel,* it wasn’t so much an “outlet” as an act of rebellion.“It definitely feels like my generation is getting the worst of the pandemic,” she says.“I’ll do most of my [university] course online and my social life is basically cancelled.” Although the virus seems to have worse health consequences for the older generation, the impacts it will have on younger generations are also likely to be long-lasting. Most of us are not living in our own homes or with loved ones – instead we are alone in a shared house (perhaps with people we don’t know very well), often without outside space, in big urban environments. In a recent Cosmopolitan survey, 97% of our readers felt lonely, and 67% said loneliness has impacted their mental health.† Then there’s the grim employment outlook – female workers aged 25 and under face the highest risk of unemployment due to the crisis.
Through lockdown, Rachel was isolating with her parents, but at the beginning of August, she moved into her university house.“At that point I thought I might as well do what I want. It feels like the best years of my life are being robbed from me. Is that a good enough excuse for why
I just stopped staying safe and all that? I’m not sure. But I definitely feel like most of the people I know now just think,
"PEOPLE THINK LIVE FOR THE MOMENT BECUASE THE FUTURE DOESNT LOOK SO RIGHT
‘F*ck it, live for the moment because the future doesn’t look so bright.’”
Reality check
Dr Gee Yen Shin is a consultant virologist at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Like most virus specialists, the thought of crowded spaces makes him incredibly wary. “COVID-19 seems to be mostly spread through droplets, when people breathe out – perhaps when they’re talking to one another or singing. That’s why the advice is to keep a 2m distance from others – I can’t see how that would be possible if you’re in a big crowd.” Once inhaled, the virus incubates in the body – establishing itself within the cells of the respiratory tract (including the throat and lungs). At this point the infected person will have no symptoms.“Just because someone looks fine doesn’t mean they’re not infected,” he continues. “It takes around five to 14 days for people to show symptoms. And there are people who show no symptoms at all.” Dr Shin points out that the virus also spreads via infected surfaces and can live for days outside the body. “When you’re talking
about illegal raves,” he says, “every single aspect of this picture is the wrong thing to do in a pandemic. The virus hasn’t disappeared, and the fact that infection numbers fell after lockdown to me is just evidence that locking down, along with strict social distancing, are effective ways of controlling COVID-19. It also implies that any really significant relaxation needs to be taken with a huge amount of caution.”
And it’s not just COVID that makes the scene dangerous. Over the years that I’ve been going to these parties, I’ve seen my fair share of nefarious activity. The anythinggoes sense of lawlessness was always part of the appeal and people openly did drugs, safe in the knowledge that there were no bouncers or cameras to spy on them. Before COVID, though, the scene was mainly populated by responsible organisers who would carefully vet attendees (one organiser I know had a strict “no teens” policy) and look after the people at their parties. With nightclubs shut though, the rave scene was flooded by less experienced organisers who often found they couldn’t control the crowds. At the Daisy Nook “quarantine rave”, a 20-year-old man died of a suspected drug overdose and the police were called to investigate reports of the rape of an 18-year-old woman. At the Carrington rave, three people were stabbed.
The last party Selena went to didn’t go quite as well as the first. It was being held under the arches of a railway bridge, and to get to the site, partygoers had to be ferried across a canal on a boat. “We were queuing up to get onto the boat and the atmosphere felt weird,” says Selena.“The crowd was just sketchy, I think.” It was a bigger group than she’d seen before – “more like 1,000 people” – and there seemed to be no efforts at social distancing. “The process of getting the boat was a bit scary because you felt like that was it, you were basically going to be trapped there for the night.” The arches had been decorated with lights, there were two bars and even a “podium where they’d have dancers performing. It was hard to imagine how they’d pulled it all off in secret.” As the night wore on, the crowd got more intense.“You could barely move for people.” It was at that point that she noticed a circle forming nearby. “You know it’s not good news when that happens. I went over to see, and there was a girl having a fit. For 30 seconds no one did anything, but then two guys came and picked her up. I heard an ambulance was called for her – but who knows how quickly they would have got her to it because they’d have had to get the boat back across the canal.
I hope she’s OK.”
A reckoning
After a summer of parties, Hannah realised it was time to get back to her life. “I think going a bit wild really helped me. I guess feeling like the virus hadn’t beaten me was what I needed.” She hasn’t been to any raves since, but doesn’t regret it.“I’m back to focusing on the future,” she says.“Maybe one day I’ll talk more publicly about what I was up to, but not yet.” Though
Rachel went to a handful of events in her university town, she suspects that, at one, she may have caught COVID.“It was really scary actually,” she says. “I went from being all bravado to suddenly realising how serious it all was. I had to cancel plans with family and all of that kind of stuff – yeah, it made me feel incredibly guilty. It really made me think about the kind of person that I want to be.”
The fact is, it’s impossible to weigh the cost of these parties. Without an accurate tracing system in place and many people remaining symptom-free, there’s no way to estimate the true repercussions of off-grid mass gatherings. A night of freedom might improve one person’s mental health, but impact the physical health of countless others. With the nights closing in, winter weather making outdoor meetings less viable and festive family gatherings on the cards, the question remains – is it really worth the risk?