Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 20/06/2026 18:27:00

The upstairs club at 8 Marine Parade in Brighton carries a long history as a dance venue: before 2000 the room operated as The Hungry Years, a dedicated rock club, and it later ran as Envy before reopening as Above, the nightclub on the floor over the Charles Street Tap. The space holds around 300 and hosts LGBTQ+ events, rock and alternative nights and club sessions, reached by lift as well as stairs. The Charles Street Tap below is a fixture of Brighton's Kemptown gay village, a bar and cabaret venue that bills itself as the Queens of Craft and has won the city's Golden Handbags award for favourite cabaret venue. It serves food and drinks daily and runs a nightly programme of drag, quizzes, DJs and cabaret, with the upstairs Above space giving it a larger room for club nights and live events. Marine Parade runs along the seafront on the eastern side of the city, at the heart of an area long established as the centre of Brighton's LGBTQ+ nightlife. The pairing of a ground-floor cabaret bar with an upstairs club lets the venue move a night from early-evening shows to late dancing within the same building. For visitors the draw is a long-running gay-scene venue with a heated outdoor terrace below and a flexible club room above, set among the bars and clubs of Brighton's seafront. Its layered past, from rock club through Envy to its present incarnation, reflects the constant turnover of the city's nightlife. The ground-floor bar serves food through the day, from stone-baked pizzas and beer-battered fish and chips to a Sunday roast, and stays open late at weekends, while lift access to the upstairs club makes the whole venue reachable for less mobile visitors. Sitting just off St James's Street, the spine of Brighton's gay village, it is part of a concentration of LGBTQ+ bars and clubs that fills during the city's annual Pride, one of the largest such events in the country. The pairing of award-winning cabaret downstairs with a club above gives it an unusually broad nightly offer.