Stück in Dalston makes members define consent, and a wellbeing manager points to who hands out commissions

Stück, a new members' club and co-working space in Dalston, east London, asks everyone who applies to define consent before they get in, the Evening Standard reported on October 31, 2026. Membership costs £45 a month and opens a second floor that the public café downstairs does not reach.

A café below, a members' floor above

The founders, Karl Verboten and Hanny Amin, call Stück an "interim space between home, work and Berghain", the Berlin club. Stück was opened by the teams behind Playbody and Klub Verboten. Wallpaper* describes Playbody as a club turned design studio and Klub Verboten as one of London's longest-running consent-led nightlife communities, for which Stück is the first permanent home.

The building is a former industrial one off Kingsland High Street. Wallpaper* reports a design borrowed from Roman bathhouses, with a multi-level concrete conversation pit at the centre and a 12-metre stainless-steel bench. Wallpaper* places the opening at a moment when communities shaped by London's queer nightlife are seeking forms of permanence beyond events and club nights, and London The Inside calls the result a softer, sober, daytime environment for people in the queer and kink scenes. Membership works by application, and a communal sauna and cold-plunge suite are planned for a later phase.

Lucy Harbron's piece, which the Standard labels opinion, found a café that looks like any other well-designed room in Hackney, with free wi-fi and people on laptops. London The Inside adds that the café and co-working space are open to everyone from Monday to Wednesday, while the rest of the venue is for members and their guests. Its programme includes workshops on consent and connection. The same site notes that Roses of Elagabalus sits just over the other side of Kingsland Road, and says this corner of Dalston is becoming home to some of the most interesting queer spaces in town.

Verboten's pitch is the clubhouse. "We wanted to create a space that allows for human connection seven days a week," he told the Standard, and he compared it to the clubhouse a local bowling club takes for granted. Amin hopes members will spend the whole day there with so much to do that they do not get bored.

He says boundaries and separation are enforced between the public café and the rest, and that the space is not about play at any given moment. The doors, he adds, stay open, and a member who wants some space for themselves can be with someone else upstairs. The Standard gives no further detail on how that line is held.

What the application form asks

Every applicant is asked to define consent. London Crime News, which summarises the Standard's report, says the aim is to make sure the community has a thorough understanding of the idea. Verboten adds that he wants entry requirements and barriers kept low, in the hope that people "come here and educate themselves".

The columnist offers the venue a point in its favour. Few people, she suggests, think harder about consent than the regulars of the kink scene the founders come from. That is an argument about habits of mind, and the Standard supports it with no figure, survey or member's account.

Those two aims sit side by side on one form, and the Standard says some areas are shared between members it calls "vibe checked" and members of the public. A definition written once on an application is a sentence. A rule is something a member can invoke at 2pm on a Tuesday, with a laptop open, and the Standard's report does not say who reads the definitions or what an unconvincing answer costs an applicant.

The freelancer who says no on Monday

The sharpest question in the Standard comes from Char Srahan, Wellbeing Manager at PwC. She does not object to the mix of café and club as such. In her words, it is a matter of what happens when "the boundaries and the power structures of work" are carried into a space where people also meet for other reasons. Her example is concrete. The Standard describes Stück's community as creative freelancers, people whose income depends on introductions and commissions. Srahan asks what happens when "the person you're saying no to today" is the person you are asking for work tomorrow. Her argument does not depend on anyone behaving badly. Her view is that the main issue is power and consent where the people who control opportunities overlap with people they also meet socially. A freely chosen interaction, she says, could still carry professional consequences. Her condition is stated flatly: unless there are "huge safeguarding rules, explicit consent rules and confidential complaints procedures", it is "just an inherent risk".

She is a wellbeing manager speaking for herself, and not an academic with a study behind her. The Standard cites no research on consent in venues that mix work and social life.

What the venue says it has

The Standard reports that at Klub Verboten, safeguarding protocols were put in place with specialist training from Galop, an LGBTQ+ anti-abuse charity, and Safer Sounds. Safer Sounds works with the Metropolitan Police Service and London Councils on their Welfare And Vulnerability Engagement scheme. The Standard also reports a formal complaints procedure that members can use.

London Crime News gives a more cautious account of the new venue. It says the operators indicated that safeguarding protocols are being considered, drawing on the experience of Klub Verboten. The two accounts do not contradict each other, but they do not say the same thing about what exists at Stück today, and the sources give no date by which the full set of protocols will be in place.

Verboten has a view on why the venue is hard to place. "Local authorities over the years became gatekeepers," he says, and in his account the system wants every business to be categorisable: a bar, with a bar's conditions. A café, a co-working floor and a members' club in one building fits none of the boxes. He sees a day-to-night concept, common in Europe, where cafés turn into bars between 7am and midnight, as missing from the UK.

Neither the Standard nor London Crime News says which licence covers the building or what Hackney Council has said about it.

The law that tightened the day before

Stück's story reached readers a day after British employment law moved. From October 30, 2026, the Employment Rights Act 2025 requires employers to take "all reasonable steps" to prevent sexual harassment of their workers, according to Acas, the workplace advice service. Employers also become liable for harassment by third parties, a category that Acas says includes clients, customers, members of the public and people at conferences or events, unless they took all reasonable steps to prevent it.

Acas released a YouGov poll of British businesses ahead of the change. It found 41% of employers unaware of the change and 59% aware. Julie Dennis, Acas's Head of Inclusivity, called it concerning that 2 in 5 bosses are not up to speed. Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities, said in the same release: "Feeling safe from sexual harassment in the workplace should be the absolute bare minimum."

Acas lists the practical steps an employer can take: clear policies, staff briefings, signage for customers, security measures and a review of supplier and customer contracts. Next to that list, a definition of consent on an application form is one measure among several, and the one the Standard says every applicant must pass through. The Standard does not say whether the venue has a staff policy or briefings of its own.

The duty is written for employers and their workers, and Acas says it applies "in the course of their employment", not only in the main workplace. Stück's members are described as freelancers, so the sources do not show how the law would reach a deal struck upstairs between two of them. The Standard's article does not raise the question.

It does give the background figure. A 2025 YouGov finding, as the Standard reports it, is that 58 per cent of women in the UK have experienced some form of sexual harassment at work, rising to 62 per cent for women aged 22 to 34.

Srahan draws the comparison that makes the venue's case, and she makes it conditionally. A well-run venue with explicit consent rules, she says, is probably better than an average office on harassment. The test she sets is the one her earlier condition already named: whether the rules, the training and the complaints route exist in practice.

Sources

• Acas, release on the new employer duty, Acas, September 3, 2026
• Acas, guidance on preventing harassment, Acas