Best Club nights London

Studio 338 opening night: a stringent door-picking policy removed 'malevolent spirits'

London's biggest nightclub opened its doors on Saturday, a venue with a capacity of 3, 000 promising something of the alfresco debauchery of Ibiza with an outdoor terrace incongruously sited next to the Blackwall Tunnel.

Studio 338 is in Greenwich, south-east London, and has hot air pumped into the outside space to heat it up in the chilly British winter. It arrives when dance music has never been more popular while the number of superclubs in the capital has never been lower.

With the exception of the evergreen Ministry of Sound at Elephant & Castle and Fabric in Farringdon, club venues had been displaced by peripatetic curators such as Broken & Uneven and London Warehouse Events (LWE), itinerant entities rotating around various semi-permanent spaces in railway arches, car parks and post-industrial shells.

Studio 338 aims to change all that, though the potential stumbling block is a location far from the clubbing hotspots of Vauxhall, Peckham and east London. The arrival of 24-hour tube in 2015 will help, but Studio 338 is primarily relying on that unique terrace plus blue-chip partners to persuade enough punters to make the trip each week.

Dan Perrin, 338's musical director, says the venue will feature "brands and artists that fanatical early-20s club kids would walk barefoot to Kent to go and see, " citing respected US deep house crews Soul Clap and Wolf + Lamb, Berlin club Watergate, and London's Secretsundaze. Perrin says house and techno are "90% of the musical character of this place", but drum'n'bass brand Hospitality will also appear.

The founder wants to remain anonymous and wouldn't disclose financial matters, but Perrin describes him as owning "specialist places in and around Bow, mostly eastern European cultural type places, if you will". Perrin sums up the club's niche as follows: "If Fabric is Berlin, this place is Ibiza or Croatia – more outdoor sunshine party time than head-down chinstroking."

Its position may be an issue, though. Fabric opened a sister club in 2008 in the nearby Millennium Dome, Matter, only for it to be cut off by extensive Jubilee line weekend engineering; its replacement, Proud2, also floundered and closed last year.

"It's a lot harder to launch a venue now than it was years ago, " says Paul Jack of LWE. "Getting people in there week in week out without the name or established years of reputation is quite difficult."

It's now Building Six, a space used by LWE for one-off events. "Having to book 104 dates a year is difficult for anyone, and for a big space it's even more difficult, " Jack says. "Not having the fixed overheads of a venue is a massive advantage."

Phil Dudman, clubs editor of Mixmag magazine, said: "The youth are a discerning bunch – and in London, you can be really fussy ... Things are pretty fierce in this market, because it's more popular than it's ever been, but diluted across a very interesting scene."

The crowd at the opening are buzzy, laughing and upbeat, perhaps as a result of a stringent door-picking policy designed to remove "malevolent spirits", as Perrin calls them. Leanne from Romford, a walking masterclass in foundation application, looks on approvingly. "The people are under control, there's no trouble, it's nice. No one's too over-friendly, too over-hyped. This is the best club I've been to in London, definitely – Shoreditch doesn't pull the names which you want it to pull."

Her friends Charlie and Jack are also full of praise. "They've taken a risk with it, and they've done well, " says Jack. "For me, this beats Fabric, " says Charlie. "It's brilliant. It's more focused on something from abroad – someone said it reminds them a lot of Space in Ibiza. It doesn't seem like what you usually get in England. It wouldn't fit in a high street, would it?"

Working in its favour will be the less enchanting side of the warehouse scene. "People are getting fed up with paying £30 to get into a disused car park with no heating, no toilets, and £5 cans of Red Stripe from a polystyrene box, " says Dudman. He believes, however, that ultimately the two sides of London clubland can coexist."It's a bit Wild West", Dudman continues. "There's people still going out and doing a land grab and a gold rush for these little places, throwing a party and pack it up and go somewhere else. Whereas the Studio 338s are like the town bosses, establishing themselves as a trading post. They work side by side."