I’ve been on certain parts of the map; you’ve been to places that I wish I’d been to – all those New York clubs, for example. If wikiHow has helped you, please consider a small contribution to support us in helping more readers like you. By going deep into the spatial history of British dancefloors she gives us the personal stories of several venues, showing the ripples of lives changed and communities enriched. Has there been a generation before or after that has that intense social life based on the dancefloor?

The political questions posed by the book also mean a fascinating insight into things like anti-jazz sentiment in occupied Ireland, the citizen-built dancefloors of Lewisham, house music as a coping mechanism for queer people of colour in Chicago, policies like Section 696 in London which underpinned the closure of nightclub spaces. Each time we move,” Warren says, “we share information about who we are, where we’ve been and where we’re going, like the body’s version of accent or tone of voice … Each gesture, flex, slide or shape we make in response to music contains communication and history. Speaking as someone whose late adolescence was partly played out on the dancefloor, the idea of dancing on camera – let alone that the footage might then be freely available – would have not only have contravened clubbers’ etiquette, but completely killed the fun. Somehow by imagining those dancefloors I could imagine my Anglo Saxon self wailing around the hay bales.They flipped racism, homophobia and sexism into pounding BPMs, pioneering influential scenes in Detroit, Chicago and New York. If you’ve got a whole load of people who are really responding to what the DJ is playing, then the DJ is going to go a certain way, aren’t they, because of how the dancefloor is responding.

From the opening, Warren (who contributes to Caught by the River herself) posits that, actually, we are all dancers – and as the book fluidly unravels, it becomes more and more clear just how important that sentiment is. And he described a night where a big guy comes in all pent-up and they’re saying, ‘Boy, he’s going to be trouble’.To know that what you’re doing might be older than language, deeper than love; that dancing built our venues and directed the DJs and music-makers and their tunes. On top of the personal anxieties sown online, Covid left a huge legacy of fears of infection, and a general sense that mixing with others risked harm and trouble. Contrary to what you’d expect, its demographic is not students and twentysomethings: it’s mainly thirty-plus and mixed in gender, occupation and race.

Studies show that dancing improves out-of-the-box thinking and, when pregnant, helps foetal development and maternal wellbeing. She also says the association of dance culture and wantonness is why clubs are often in the cross-hairs of the authorities.She tells a poignant lovely story about a lady dancing her grandad into the next life (I’ll leave this for the book). there was a mass upsurge of arms and a collective dancing style that mixed a cockney knees up with the militant skanking and stepping embodied by men and women in Brixton reggae dances three decades earlier.

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