The best clubs in Bristol, from Motion to Lakota

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.

The best clubs in Bristol now.

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 this guide embeds them as part of the city's Boiler Room history rather than attaching them to Lakota, Motion or any other single room.

Where to go out in Bristol.

Motion's new site on Victoria Terrace and Lakota's Upper York Street building both sit within the Old Market and St Philip's area east of the city centre, a short walk or cab ride from each other. Thekla is a different kind of night out entirely: a converted cargo ship, built in Germany in 1959, that arrived in Bristol in 1983 and opened the following year, on 1 May 1984, as The Old Profanity Showboat. It's moored in the Floating Harbour and run today by DHP Family, the promoter behind Nottingham's Rock City among other UK venues, mainly as a live-music room that also runs club nights on its lower deck.

Beyond these three, Bristol's own listings regularly point newcomers toward SWX, a live-music-and-club space in a former nightclub building; Marble Factory, Thekla's sister venue in the same harbourside complex; Basement 45; and The Fleece, better known as a gig venue. None of the four were researched to the same depth as Motion, Lakota and Thekla for this guide.