The roof was leaking when Newton Dunbar realised the tiles had gone. He realised his building would soon be gone, too.
By then, he was living in a makeshift flat above the Four Aces, the club he had run for 30 years at 12 Dalston Lane. Below him, people had danced to reggae, soul and soundsystem music - in later years, they would come for acid house, hardcore and jungle. Above them, Newton worked and slept.
His daughter Natalie remembers the flat. Her father had wooden panelling installed, then called her and her brother up to see the finished room. He was a serious man, she says, with something of a headmaster about him. He was rarely home. When he was, he was usually asleep - catching up on the hours he had spent at the club.
Newton had been an electrician. In the early days, he continued working during the week and ran the Four Aces on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, labouring on the building in between. He was interested in what made a room work. Sound, he told Hackney Museum in 2010, bounced off walls. A club had to withstand “heavy duty frequencies”. The building itself, he said, was inanimate until he had the privilege of making it come alive.
From blues parties to Dalston Lane
The idea for the club came from the blues parties Newton had attended: gatherings held in people’s houses, where a sound system would be carried in, and guests paid a little to get through the door. People worked long weeks, taking as much overtime as they could, and needed somewhere to let off steam. Newton began to wonder whether there might be a business in providing it.
“Lots and lots of money,” he recalled to the Hackney Museum. He entered the club business, he said, innocently.
Winstan Whitter had known the Four Aces since childhood. His father managed the Hideaway, a basement room at the club, and worked there as a caterer and DJ. He prepared Jamaican food at home, then brought it to Dalston Lane in enormous pots in the boot of his car: curry goat, fried chicken, a little jerk, and patties from a bakery. Whitter was around nine years old. He remembers the club as dimly lit, smoky, intimate and loud. Sometimes he was still there at one in the morning, running around while the adults carried on below. Food was as much a part of the night as music and drink.
Newton was usually upstairs, in an office Whitter remembers as almost another club: a place to sit, talk, make friends and watch the CCTV screens. Newton would come downstairs to see what was happening, then return to his own hideaway. Whitter called him Mr Newton. He had known him for so long that the club was not simply a venue he remembered - it was part of the world he had grown up in.
“Newton is the connection,” he told Louder Than War in 2016. “He is the living archive.” His film, Legacy in the Dust, brought together musicians, DJs and clubgoers whose experiences traced a shift from reggae and soul to acid house, hardcore and jungle. For Whitter, the story was also about what happened when the places that made those scenes possible were erased: “You knock down the building and the story goes,” he said.
When the Four Aces opened, Black music had few places to be heard. Newton remembered a period when British radio stations would not play it, and venues catering to what was considered respectable music would not book the bands. The Four Aces became a place for Black entertainment in Dalston, drawing sound systems from across London and, eventually, live performers from Jamaica and the US.
Desmond Dekker, Jimmy Cliff, Ben E. King and Alton Ellis all played there. Bob Marley came to hang out, though he never performed. Bob Dylan visited with bodyguards. Chrissie Hynde would sit at the bar. Alton Ellis, who came regularly, once spotted Newton in the audience at the Jazz Café in Camden. He jumped off the stage to shake his hand, then returned to his performance.
Natalie remembers her father working with Saxon Sound, the pioneering British reggae and dancehall sound system. Newton was adaptable, ambitious, and, as more than one person points out, in it for the money too.
The club had a reputation beyond Dalston. Timothy Wade, who was serving in the army in Edinburgh, would spend his weekends travelling south for Labrynth, the club’s later rave nights. The journey took around three and a half hours each way. He would spend Friday night at the Four Aces, find a bed and breakfast for Saturday, then carry on to the Paradise Club in Islington and the Loft in Shepherd’s Bush. By Sunday afternoon, he would be heading north again. Sometimes he fell asleep on the last train and ended up stranded, having to phone his army camp to explain that he would catch the first train back. Extra guard duty awaited him that week.
Asked what made it worth the journey, he had a simple answer. The music was “way ahead of everywhere else”.
Raids and courtrooms
The police were a regular presence, too. Newton said the Four Aces was raided about three times a month. When officers came in, people ran. The business suffered; people were reluctant to return. He believed the club was targeted because it was Black-run and had a predominantly Black crowd.
In 1988, 60 armed officers forced their way into the club with sledgehammers. Fourteen people were arrested and seven charged, including Newton. The raid became known as the “Daily Mail raid”, as the newspaper’s reporters and cameras accompanied the police. Police alleged that the club was linked to a group they called the Yardies, and to local drug dealing.
Natalie remembers her father being tried alongside the other men at Snaresbrook Crown Court. She recalls the judge turning to the prosecution and saying: “You’ve put this man in with these other men.” It was one of many cases. Newton was taken to court 14 times by the council and the police, but, in Newton’s words, “they never succeeded”.
Natalie remembers raids happening every week. One arrest has stayed with her. Police tied her father’s wrists so tightly that the plastic cut into his skin, she recalls, then took him from his flat and kicked him down the ladder steps. He spent the night in the cold, wearing only a shell suit. When Natalie saw him the following day, his face was black and blue and his hands badly swollen. He later developed a chest infection.
She describes it as a wake-up call.
Enter Labrynth
By the late 1980s, Newton was exhausted by the raids. Joe Wieczorek was facing a different problem. He had been organising illegal warehouse parties under the name Labrynth, but finding somewhere to hold them was becoming increasingly difficult.
The first connection came through a pair of parties near Shacklewell Lane in December 1989. Both were raided, Wieczorek remembers. On the second night, when it was shut down, Wieczorek sent people to the Four Aces, where a night called Tears was struggling to attract a crowd. The arrangement worked for both sides. Newton remembered it.
In January 1990, Newton offered him the venue. Wieczorek and his partner would have to run the whole operation themselves, from security and staffing to the bar. Newton would retain one bar in the main room; the rest of the building was Wieczorek’s to run.
“There’s the keys, get on with it,” Wieczorek remembers him saying.
Nothing was signed. For the next eight years, the arrangement ran on a verbal agreement. At the end of each night, Wieczorek would tell Newton how much the club had taken and what it had spent. They would divide what was left, and see each other the following week. Wieczorek had the keys seven days a week.
“He was an incredibly trusting man,” Wieczorek says. “He wasn’t stupid.”
Newton secured a late licence, first until 5am, then 6am. The later finish changed the crowds, Wieczorek remembers: from a few hundred people to full houses. The club was painted black. Wieczorek and his team changed the decor and began taking over more of the building.
Newton had ideas of his own. One day, he took Wieczorek through a door near the basement and showed him a garden he had never noticed. There were trees, but little else. They put out lights, chairs and tables, and called it the hidden garden. It could accommodate another two or three hundred people.
The crowd that stayed
The music changed, too. Newton recalled that the last sound system to play at the club was Fat Man’s, whose sons ran the set. After a police raid, they did not want to return. The following week, the Four Aces opened its doors to an acid-house crowd. Newton estimated that 99.9 per cent of them were white.
The police came back. This time, the dancers did not run. They kept dancing while officers moved through the club with video cameras and bright lights, searching for the source of the music. It took them about 15 minutes to find it, Wieczorek remembers. By then, the crowd had made its point. The police eventually left.
For Wieczorek, the difference was striking: the club had spent years being raided while its predominantly Black crowd ran for the exits. Now, with a largely white crowd on the dance floor, the response was different. The dancers stayed put. Any charges brought were later dropped, Wieczorek says.
Newton remembered this night as “providence”.
The building had once been a circus. It was a maze of rooms and passages, with escape hatches leading out of Newton’s office. It seemed that when the police came, Newton would be the only one to disappear.
The following week, he said, the club was busier still. He described the next eight years as a period of continuous progression.
Newton did not immediately understand rave, Wieczorek says, but he caught on quickly. He watched the new crowd arrive and helped the club adapt. He also gave emerging acts a chance. The Prodigy’s first performance as a four-piece came about almost by accident. Wieczorek was downstairs when their manager Ziggy and Keith Flint approached him. There were four members of the band and four dancers, they explained. Wieczorek offered them £80.
He remembers Maxim joining them on stage that night for the first time. The queue stretched around the block and into Kingsland Road.
Newton remained in the building, sitting among people and chatting away in his office, while the rooms below filled with a different generation of dancers. Wieczorek calls him a mentor of immense quality. They became friends, he says, and stayed on good terms throughout their eight years at the club.
By the end, Wieczorek says, Labrynth had expanded beyond the Four Aces itself, taking in the neighbouring club and the former theatre auditorium, which they used as a chill-out space. One night, he recalls, they had 3,000 people across the buildings, despite the licence being for just 150.
“We weren’t angels ourselves,” he says.
Then the building began to come apart.
Squeezed out
Wieczorek and his team left the Four Aces on New Year’s Eve 1997, moving to the Pleasure Rooms in Tottenham. They had been offered another venue, but Wieczorek describes the departure as the culmination of years of pressure.
In September 1994, Wieczorek and his partner had been arrested by HM Customs and Excise over alleged VAT evasion of £1.25 million. The case went through two mistrials before reaching Snaresbrook Crown Court in March 1997. Wieczorek says they continued running Labrynth throughout, with prison a possibility until they were eventually acquitted.
The relief was short-lived. Wieczorek says the compulsory purchase process followed soon afterwards. He and Newton attended a public inquiry, but Wieczorek came away convinced the outcome had already been decided. Someone involved with the council, who regularly attended Labrynth, showed him a document naming three proposed towers: Labyrinth Tower, Collins Tower and Dunbar Tower.
“They’re not going to let up here,” Wieczorek remembers thinking.
The council was still talking about a cinema for the site, but Wieczorek had come to believe the club would be removed regardless. The compulsory purchase process convinced him that staying was no longer viable.
The missing roof
Once Labrynth left, the building stood empty. Newton was still living in his hideaway above the club. The redevelopment, including the proposed cinema, did not materialise. Meanwhile, the roof tiles disappeared.
Wieczorek says a deal was made with the council that led to a roofing company being instructed to remove them. He believes the tiles were probably sold, and suspects the roof was stripped to make the building unusable. He says he knows the man who removed them and that a photograph exists showing the work.
With the roof exposed, rain began to eat away at the interior. In a 2005 submission to Hackney Council, the campaign group OPEN Dalston argued that the resulting deterioration was the consequence of neglect, and not simply due to the building’s age.
That year, OPEN Dalston commissioned a structural appraisal from the Morton Partnership. Its author, Brian Morton, concluded that the former theatre could be repaired and reused. The neighbouring buildings at 4–10 Dalston Lane could also be retained “without enormous expense being incurred”, he wrote.
Morton went further, arguing that the buildings’ condition had been brought about by what he called “deliberate neglect” on the part of their owners, Hackney Council.
The council offered a different account. Its consultation report cited a fire, along with concerns about structural integrity and unauthorised occupation, and concluded that demolition was the most appropriate option. The buildings were not statutorily listed, and English Heritage had recommended against listing them.
“We had it all”
By then, Winstan Whitter had begun documenting what was at stake. While making Legacy in the Dust, his 2008 documentary about the club, he became involved in the campaign to save the former Dalston Theatre. Much of his work, he told the Hackney Citizen in 2011, grew from “my quest to learn more about where I live”.
The film led to another, Save Our Heritage, documenting the attempt to preserve the buildings. Working with the architectural practice Bootstraps, campaigners developed an alternative scheme for the site: housing and community space, with the Four Aces retained. Whitter says they found an investor prepared to put £3 million into the proposal.
“We had it all,” he remembers. “And that should have happened.”
The drawings show what might have been: the theatre frontage restored, the neighbouring Georgian buildings repaired, trees planted alongside a widened pavement. Housing sits alongside the old buildings rather than in their place.
The scheme did not go ahead. In 2007, the buildings were demolished.
The New Four Aces
“When the Four Aces was taken away I was left in a void with nothing to do,” Newton told the Hackney Citizen in 2014.
He had kept the original Four Aces sign. After the demolition, he took it to DJ sets, carrying a piece of the club with him. More than 300 people turned up to his first gig, at Eastern Curve Garden. The applause took him by surprise.
“The New Four Aces is wherever I play,” he said.
He carried on DJing into old age, joking that it saved him from “looking for the carpet slippers” and kept his brain from withering. He also spoke about Dalston’s transformation around the 2012 Olympics, describing its new appearance as a “face-lift”. Sometimes, he said, when you tidy a place up, you throw away valuable antiques and icons. The new face would one day become ancient, too.
A name on a tower
One of the towers that replaced the club bears his name: Dunbar Tower.
He was neither told nor consulted. In a 2014 interview with VICE, he said he did not know whether the developers were "taking the mickey" or had some more sinister intention. It was certainly no compensation for the building, he said.
Whitter remembers going with Newton to an office where brochures for the development were laid out on a table. The tower bore Newton’s name. Whitter asked the staff who Dunbar was. They had no idea. Newton was standing right there.
Whitter believes the council failed to listen to the people trying to preserve the site, and argues that the housing which followed did not deliver what local residents had wanted – nor what he says had been promised: local housing for local people.
The flats in Dunbar Tower are not cheap. Property data platform Bricks & Logic estimates that the average sale price in the building is £580,000 and the average monthly rent is £3,050. Its data lists 37 properties in the building, including 32 flats. In neighbouring Collins Tower, a two-bedroom, two-bathroom flat measuring 794 sq ft was advertised on Rightmove for £2,817 a month, with a 24/7 concierge service and a residents’ gym.
Natalie has spent years trying to get her father properly remembered. A plaque commemorating him is due to be unveiled at Hackney Archives on Saturday 24 October, before being installed on Collins Tower the following week, facing the old site.
Wieczorek believes the memorial is the very least Newton, who died in 2024, deserves. The recognition is welcome, he says, but it comes after the “taking” of the place itself.
Whitter is glad that Newton is being commemorated. However, he has spent years asking what might occupy the space beside the library, where the clubs once stood. He has suggested an exhibition space, and would still like to see a venue return.
The plaque is a start, he says, but there is more the council could do. He has kept an eye on the authorities, which opposed the campaign to save the building while it was still standing, and which now memorialise the Four Aces after its disappearance.
“It’s always the case,” he says, “they celebrate stuff when it’s gone.”
Natalie remembers how deeply her father was affected by the loss of the Four Aces. The club had occupied 30 years of his life. After it was demolished, he struggled to find his place without it. But the photographs she has kept tell another part of the story. In them, Newton stands beside the sign bearing his name, grinning. He had not been consulted about the tower, and he had made clear that its name was no compensation for the club. Still, he was quietly proud to have his name on something.
Newton once spoke of rising from the dust, like a phoenix. He was talking about the possibility of another Four Aces. There has not been one yet – though perhaps Natalie can change that. But for now, there is the sign he kept, the people who remember the rooms, and the records he played. And there is his name, fixed to a building he did not choose, overlooking the place where he made his life.
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