Deja Vu

History

Opened 9 August 2014

Opened

9 August 2014

Unit

1A/2, Englishgate Plaza

Status

Asset of Community Value

Sixties, seventies and eighties music, Motown, soul and disco, on Friday and Saturday nights plus bank holiday Sundays. Dancing rather than drinking is the point, and the same two men, Darren and Chris, have been playing the records for years.

It is the steady one in a volatile building. Deja Vu opened on 9 August 2014 and has kept the same name and the same idea for over a decade, while the unit down the row has been through five identities in the same period. CAMRA have it registered as an Asset of Community Value, which is not something many late bars manage: it means somebody made the case that the place matters to the community and the council agreed.

Reviews split on the room rather than the music. The dance floor and the playlist get praised consistently; what gets complained about is the seating, of which there is little, and the lack of a cloakroom. Get there early if you want a table.

The building is newer than the street it stands on. Englishgate Plaza is a modern development of three-storey blocks, forty-seven thousand square feet of shops at ground level with offices above, a hundred metres from the station, at the city end of Botchergate: the Caledonian and the old street are a few minutes further out. How old it is exactly is unsettled. The commercial listings give the plaza a build date of 2008, but that cannot be right: the licences in it run back to 2005, and the unit down the row had already been the Litten Tree before Party Party opened there in late 2008. No better date is recorded.

The plaza holds six of this site's venues across five licensed units, and has had more. In the summer of 2026 a unit numbered 7 was being advertised to let as a fully fitted bar of about 3,577 square feet at twelve thousand pounds a year, which tells you something about what bar premises here are worth at the moment. Whether that is the same Unit 7 that Box Arena occupies in the Portlands part of the block has not been established; the two developments run together and the numbering overlaps.