Any OT parents ever taken your kids to a Toddler Rave?

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In the days leading up to the toddler rave, every time my wife used the phrase “toddler rave” (as in: “I’ve booked our tickets to the toddler rave,” or, “Remember, we’re taking V to the toddler rave on Sunday”) I assumed it was her funny, knowing way of saying “children’s party”. I pictured balloons, cake and “Nellie the Elephant”: infants doing their weird stompy dancing, bubbles, tantrums and perhaps a village hall.

But when we arrived in Hackney Wick, a formerly industrial area of east London, at around 2pm, the venue turned out to be a looming warehouse covered in high-grade street art.

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The space was full of bodies. V, M and S were handed glowsticks. Behind the decks there were a man and a woman wearing luminescent glasses. The looped piano riff and squelching bass of Orbital’s 1990 single “Chime” was instantly recognisable. Citizens of Hackney, in their thirties and forties – wearing their best T-shirts and clasping tall cans of Japanese lager – were dancing with (or in eyesight of, or in search of) their children. Staring into the coloured lights, they seemed transported – as if Wayne and Garth had waved their arms and triggered a screen-dissolve back to the early Nineties.

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