By katyha on Mon 20 Jan 2003 at 18:51
A group of us have adopted Club L'Amour as our monthly fetish home. For me, it supplies what I want in a fetish club: comfort, relaxation, the chance to watch people having sex as well as doing BDSM scenes, and an air of quiet decadence that the bigger nightclubs lack.
In fact, it's not really a club at all. It's more like a house party, and the venue is the main reason why. Though awkward to get to - since it's in the wilderness of Purley Way, Croydon - it really is worth it. It's essentially a big flat, all on one level, on the first floor above a loft shop. The decor is fun - red curtains, gold statues of torsos attached to the wall, big squashy sofas and beanbags, and TVs showing porn (or in one case, for some reason, Tomb Raider). The music varies a lot, but is not loud enough to be intrusive unless you're in the bar/dancefloor area.
Features of the club include a paddling pool full of leather strips (big enough for about six people, we discovered, if they're friendly); a darkroom; a small dance floor; a good-sized semi-private bed; and a 'grope box' - a cubicle big enough for two or more people, with peepholes. As you will have gathered, this is very much a sex-positive club.
On the more directly BDSM side, the equipment is rather pretty, and seems to work very well, especially the silver tentacled thing that you can chain people to. There's a cage as well as various pieces of flogging equipment, and all of them seemed to get used at some point in the evening. The small size of the venue means that you can run the risk of getting hit by a backswing, but you can always go round the other way, and it didn't seem to be spoiling anyone's fun. More of an issue is the usual problem - single men with a limited understanding of club etiquette. The place is normally a swingers' club and perhaps the rules are different there. However, although women can run a risk of getting inappropriately stroked or chatted up a little too insistently, we've never had anything worse than that. I wouldn't say the problem was any worse than at most fetish clubs, and the atmosphere of the place made me almost forget it was a problem - it's so friendly that it's hard to feel threatened. And, though we've never needed to test it, I'm sure the club organisers would be quick to stamp down on anyone getting out of hand.
They sell only a limited number of tickets, so it's worth booking in advance, especially since the current price is £18 on the door as opposed to £14 for pre-booked places. We've never had a problem getting in though, and the limit on numbers stops the place getting overcrowded. The dress code is general fetish; they used to do monthly themes, but they seemed to have stopped that.
We started going to this club several months ago, and since then a group of us have gone to every event there - more of us every time as the word spreads. There's another club running at the venue, also a fetish club, which I'm keen to try as well sometime.
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