Artists and craftspeople are forever seeking studios that they can afford and from the early 1980s were attracted to the derelict and neglected Victorian warehouses and arches at King’s Cross, with their sense of abandoned history and cavernous spaces.
The Motor Repair Depot, by then known as the Roadline Depot, was entered by turning left at the walled end of Battle Bridge Road, opposite the former Mission Hall of the Culross Building. Owned by National Carriers Ltd, it had fallen into disuse by the mid-1980s. The large repair sheds and earlier buildings, together with an assortment of equipment and vehicles, were abandoned. Culross residents and other magpies would pick over the remains, amazed that the site could be left empty and unsecured for so long.
The depot sheds and warehouses proved an ideal location to squat for the Mutoid Waste Company, which moved there in the late 1980s from the old bus station in the Caledonian Road. Influenced by the film Mad Max they became famous for building giant welded post-apocalyptic sculptures from scrap machinery and waste materials and for customising broken down cars. They developed a good relationship with many Culross residents. As one recalls, ‘I gave them my car and they turned it into a crocodile’ (Steve Neylon, for King’s Cross Voices).
Embracing the burgeoning acid house movement, despite their philosophy of creativity without artificial stimulants, they organised spectacular shed parties, decorating the depot with murals, mutated cars, machines, sculptures made from waste material and dragons belching flames.
Charging a tenner entry, within two weeks they were overwhelmed by numbers. Some semblance of legality was maintained by inviting the police, showing them around and creating a favourable impression, but the police evicted them in 1989 after several raids. By then a collective of some twenty artists had been together for five years. They returned briefly to squat the buildings for a memorial event for their drummer Ivan Tarashenko (seen on right at 100 Club) who had been killed in the 1987 King’s Cross Underground fire. In his memory, 400 people played drums on various objects including cars and dustbins. The experience was described by a Culross resident as ‘Mad Max gone mad’.
Some twenty-five years after these events, Mutoid Waste and their recycled steampunk creations feature regularly at Glastonbury. Joe Rush, one of the two founders, designed and directed the vehicles and special effects for the spectacular closing ceremony of the London 2012 Paralympic Games, and the mobile stages on which Coldplay and Rihanna performed so memorably (see image).