By around 10pm on a Wednesday evening, several women are undressing in the dank, cramped basement corridors outside the Windmill club’s three windowless changing rooms. The combination of the unceasing rain and roadworks in the streets above is causing chaos. One of the rooms has flooded overnight and bits of the ceiling have fallen down. The other two are full already, so women are stripping off their clothes wherever there is space. Beneath the prevailing smell of hairspray and scent, a peculiar sewagey odour seeps in from Soho’s flooded drains.
Women arrive in anoraks, wearing dirty trainers and fusty brown tights, eating greasy panini, holding their noses and complaining about the smell, and spend around an hour transforming themselves into beautiful, heavily made-up night peacocks, in floaty, gauzy, transparent dresses and leopardprint bras.
-The Long Good Read
