(For now)

East London’s Moth Club – home to a leading comedy club and immortalised in a UKTV series – has been saved from developers.

Hackney Council have sided with a community-led campaign and refused a planning application for a building directly next to the venue

The venue feared that had the building gone ahead, they would have been subjected to noise complaints from their new neighbours.

Hackney council told the venue of the decision on Thursday. 

In a statement posted online, the Moth Club said: ‘Thanks to everyone who signed, shared and stood with Moth Club, the planning application for the building directly next to us has been refused! This is a huge win. We couldn’t have done it without your support.

‘That said, the fight is not over. There’s still another planning application in progress, which could still put MOTH’s future at risk. We need to keep spreading the word and make sure our venue continues to be a home for live music, comedy and grassroots culture.’

The venue opened in 1972 as an ex-serviceperson’s club and in the last ten years has become a hub for live music, comedy, film nights, club events, and more.

Comedy Club Knock2Bag hosts regular nights there and in 2022 U&Dave aired a five-part series Live At The Moth Club (pictured), mixing onstage performances and fictionalised comic offstage drama . It starred the likes of Mark Heap, Freddie Meredith, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Seb Cardinal, Dustin Demri-Burns, Natasia Demetriou and Ellie White. Promoter and comedian Harry Deansway claimed programme-makers Baby Cow had plagiarised his idea for the show, but he lost the subsequent court case.

In rejecting the application this week, planners said the developers’ proposal ‘fails to demonstrate that the new residential use would not result in unreasonable restrictions being placed on the Moth Club’, contravening  national guidelines.

The proposed building was also found to have not provided enough affordable housing and lacked provisions for disabled residents, while the site had ‘a strong possibility of containing remains of archaeological importance’.

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Published: 28 Mar 2026