Is this east London's strangest licensing dispute?

It felt like something from a story book. “I came home one day late at night, and I saw a corner shop, my old corner shop — the first corner shop I ever went to as a kid — and it was vacant with a 'to let' sign,” recalls Dean George, the 30-year-old founder of Gauchoworld, a magazine-cum-lifestyle brand. He decided to take over the spot to hold events and music nights. Gauchoworld Space soon became a local darling, an example of a rare community-driven youth culture in a city increasingly lacking them. In May this year, Hackney council even came out to do a profile — in the form of a glowing Instagram interview — about what was happening in the venue, describing the space and its owner as “a local success story still yet to fully unfold”.

But just five months later, that very same council was holding a meeting to determine if the space deserved to have a future, one so chaotic it would rival the viral Handforth Parish Council meeting. How things got this bad in just a few months is a saga involving a dead dog, claims of council conspiracies, racist emails and accusations of public defecation. It’s a debate that’s caused a civil war in a normally quiet corner of Hackney, between angry locals and a venue that wasn’t the simple community space it seemed from the outside.

'The loud chatter of crowds while trying to get to sleep'

I’m huddled up with my laptop enjoying one of my favourite pastimes: watching a livestream of a local council sub-committee. It’s the evening of 7 October, and the Gauchoworld founder is face-to-face over Zoom with about a dozen critics in a licensing hearing held by Hackney council. I say face-to-face, but that isn’t quite accurate — the first ten minutes of the very formal bureaucratic council meeting are spent in a futile, yet heated, argument over whether George and his opponents should be forced to put their Zoom cameras on. It set the tone for a meeting that increasingly veered into the absurd. At one point, a single laughing face emoji from George was enough to drive the meeting into sheer chaos.