The best clubs in Bristol, from Motion to Lakota

The best clubs in Bristol now.

Motion's old size and DJ Mag ranking describe its Avon Street years, not the capacity or programme of its new room. For any Motion-branded event, confirm the venue on the organiser's listing. Check Bristol's current club listings and each venue's own programme before going; a gig at Thekla is not necessarily a club night.

Motion, in more depth.

Motion opened in 2006 in a former skatepark on Avon Street, and grew over the following years into a 4,000-capacity, five-room warehouse complex that DJ Mag ranked among the world's best clubs and named the UK's best large club. For most of its run it was the venue that Bristol's biggest touring DJs and its own drum and bass scene, including the long-running Hospitality Bristol nights, treated as home ground.

In November 2024, Motion's team announced that the owners of its Grade II-listed Avon Street building had declined to renew the lease, due to expire the following July. Rather than close outright, the venue launched a crowdfunding campaign, #KEEPMOTIONMOVING, aiming to raise the money to find and fit out a new site. Motion played its final nights on Avon Street in July 2025, after nineteen years, and reopened later that year at a new address, Unit 2 on Victoria Terrace, under the same name and team.

Lakota and Bristol's bass-music line.

Lakota, a warehouse-style club on Upper York Street with four dance floors, has been running club nights since the early 1990s, and Resident Advisor's own listing calls it Bristol's "home of the underground." Its bookings back that up on the page rather than just the slogan: Metalheadz has held Blue Note Sessions there, the jungle night Jungle Cakes is a recurring booking, and drum and bass labels including Eatbrain and Neuroheadz have run nights on its bill. Andy C and Tonn Piper headlined its New Year's Eve line-up in 2021.

None of that makes Lakota a museum piece. Alongside the drum and bass and jungle nights, its four rooms run hardcore, dubstep, psytrance and techno through the week, closer to a working multi-genre club than a genre showcase.

Boiler Room's own visits to the city, in 2015, ran a short season of Bristol-only broadcasts rather than one-off bookings: Hodge, a producer working the dubstep and techno border, filmed a set in the city on 6 August, and Shanti Celeste, a house and disco DJ who had just signed to Julio Bashmore's Broadwalk label, filmed hers on 28 September.

Both sets are still credited on Boiler Room's own channel as filmed in Bristol rather than at a named club, so they belong to the city's Boiler Room history rather than to Lakota, Motion or any other single room.