Thackerays

Name: Thackerays
Location: Esplanade, St Helier
Period: Late 1980's to mid-1990s
Fate: Demolished
Regular Tunes: Chart music

Thackerays was a nightclub which underwent a number of (sometimes radical) changes over a relatively brief period spanning the late 80s to early 90s, which I will describe in rather more depth a little further down the page.  The club was situated on the Esplanade next to what today is the branch of  HSBC making the corner with Gloucester Street. At the time it was active Thackerays was directly over the road from the beach, the reclamation site had not yet been filled in so the Les Jardin de la Mer didn't exist.

Entry to the club was by a door at ground level on the Esplanade facing the seafront, a couple of feet inside which to the right hand side was the till. Directly behind that a flight of stairs went up to the second floor, the main area of the club.

Here's a rough floorplan of the upstairs of Thackerays during the early 1990s, kept quite basic because of the changes the club underwent;
















This upstairs space was large enough to have a couple of almost seperate areas. There was one bar off to the right hand side, seperated partially from the rest of the room by a wall. To the left was an open-plan cocktail bar area which had a few small tables to each side (one tabled area being slightly raised a couple of steps above floor level, with a railing around the edge). There was also a length of couch style seating directly in front of the cocktail bar, facing the dancefloor (which was between the two bar areas). Stools ran along the window which overlooked the Esplanade but was heavily tinted so you couldn't see out. The toilets were also on this floor, and one odd thing I recall is how spacious they were, about 4 times the size of any toilets I've seen in a public place in Jersey.

Thackerays also had a smaller downstairs area, usually only opened as an overflow once the upper floor was full. I won't bother attempting a plan of this because the design was altered at least 3 times over a handful of years. It was probably less than a third of the size of the upper floor. Half of the centre of the left-hand side was taken up by a square bar surrounded on all sides by stools. The remainder of the room to the right was a seating area. I think there may at one point have been a very small dancefloor on the side of the bar furthest from the window (which as with the upper level was heavily tinted so you couldn't see out).  This downstairs area was later expanded and became The Buzz, (a radical bar experience/experiment in Jersey which is described in the following section).

Thackerays had been active as a nightclub since at least the early 1970s, when it was the kind of polite nightspot attractive to the tuxedo crowd who wanted to have a little to eat, sup cocktails and hear a houseband. By the time the 1980s arrived the clientele had changed but the club still considered itself an "upper tier" venue, coming second only to Madisons in respect of entry restrictions and costs, and drink prices. What you would spend on an average night in one of those clubs would pay for two or possibly three average nights elsewhere.

In the late 1980s Thackerays were still barring entry to anyone not wearing a shirt, tie and suit jacket. Trainers, jeans and casual attire were a definite NO. The tie and shirt thing at least, wasn't uncommon in local clubs of that period.

The average Thackerays customer of the time would have been in their early 20s, a well paid finance industry employee or office worker. The music upstairs tended to veer towards that commonly played in "Yuppie" wine bars, modern Pop in its most inoffensive form; Swing Out Sister, Johnny Hates Jazz , Curiousity Killed The Cat, Sade, etc. Downstairs the policy seemed to be a little more cheesy, older music in the vein of "Saturday Night At The Movies" and "Crocodile Rock". 

As the world moved gradually towards (and into) the 1990s, the island's previously entry-strict nightclubs began to realise they had to lower their standards to maintain the flow of young cash-wielding customers through their doors. Rave culture was a little slow to catch on in Jersey, but once it did (along with the "Madchester" scene) it changed the face of local clubbing. Young seasonal workers were arriving from Northern England expecting to be able to go clubbing in jeans, trainers and Stone Roses t-shirts, and fashion-concious young local clubbers were getting tired of having to strap themselves into a suit and shiny shoes for a night out. So even clubs which previously had at their most lenient allowed only the "smart casual" style of dress (proper trousers, proper shoes and a proper shirt) began to allow jeans (although with shoes only, no trainers - yet!).

It was during this period of flux that Thackerays decided to go one step further and undertake a complete revamp. This would have been about 1991, I'd guess. The club was gutted, refitted and rebranded (under a name I can't now remember), with a greatly relaxed door policy and general attitude.

Opening night saw the new club granted an extension to close at 3am. That might not sound wild with today's licensing hours, but back then it was so unique it caused a queue around the block into Gloucester Street. The revamp placed the club firmly back on the map with the average clubber, gone was the previous "elite" mentality.

For reasons best known to themselves this fresh flush of success wasn't quite enough for the club's owners, so just a couple of years later it was once again gutted and completely rebranded, this time as The Buzz. Lowering the standards yet further, the concept seemed to be Ibiza-lite. The upstairs remained a regular nightclub, not much different to before. The downstairs was vastly extended and became a standalone bar with seperate double-door entry onto the Esplanade. The bar itself ran down the left hand wall, in front of which was a clear area for standing drinkers, and then off to the right hand side was the seating area.

It was in the bar the "action" happened.

The Bailiff of Jersey would never allow the full-on debauchery of the Ibiza experience to infest our sacred shores, so there were a few drinking games but nothing too extreme. At weekends there was a wheel above the bar which span on the hour every hour, randomly selecting a drink to be sold at cut-price for that hour. There were special appearances from celebrities like "Mr Methane", a man who did all manner of tricks involving the breaking of wind. All new and exciting stuff to the Jersey pub/club scene.

And the major draw which set tongues wagging amongst the islands' virile young male drinkers? The barmaids wore bikinis. Great as that gimmick may have sounded to the management, who I presume assumed it would be guaranteed to pull blokes through the doors like a magnet, it was in reality self-defeating. The Buzz fast became a place where the customers were almost 100% male, of whom at least 50% spent the entire evening leering at the barmaids as if they'd never before been allowed within 5 meters of an actual human woman.

From a business perspective this wasn't a good thing at a time in Jersey when males outnumbered females 3 to 1, a ratio which was already painfully reflected on the clubbing scene. It wasn't uncommon for a nightclub to turn you away for being a bloke if there were too many blokes already inside. To open a club in an environment which would primarily only attract blokes, without being a gay club, was commercial suicide. Put simply, for the single heterosexual male out on the pull, the biggest spender on the club scene, a club with no birds to pull was a club not worth visiting. So the very marketing tool to which The Buzz had tied themselves was the very thing which radically reduced their marketability, to the extent that even though there was a regular nighclub on the second floor, the "male heavy" reputation of the name was enough to put many customers off.

As a consequence The Buzz lasted just a couple of years before again undergoing a rebrand, returning to being a normal nightclub (under another name I can't recall). They soldiered on for a few more years but consumer tastes had changed and they never managed to regain their pre-Buzz grip on the market.

Ultimately the club suffered the same fate as so many of the places remembered on this blog. It closed down, the building was sold and demolished, an apartment block now occupies the site.