Welcome to the gaybourhood: A guide to London's prime pink pound locations

W4 is all about phwoar, Soho is so sophisticated and Peckham is the next big same-sex hotspot. Nick Curtis visits London’s gay friendly hotspots
Attractive prospects: 'In a market where sealed bids are common, many gay couples offer higher prices for properties and thus secure them', says one estate agent

My road in SW8 has just been prettified by new bays built out into the road and planted with birch trees and flowers, aimed at calming traffic. This comes in the wake of a greasy spoon and a horrible old man’s pub mutating into agreeable café bars catering to a young crowd of boys in slim-fit shirts and girls in sockless brogues. There are smarter cars on the road than when I moved here 16 years ago, open-air screenings at my local park and the streets feel safer. Is it a coincidence that I live within a stripped-off singlet’s throw of the gyms, cafés, clubs, bars and spas around and under the railway arches of Vauxhall, which has snatched Soho’s crown as the capital’s prime LGBTQ+ village? I don’t think so.

The advantages of living in one of London’s “gaybourhoods” are easy to identify, harder to quantify. The planted road bays are down to Lambeth council, the nightlife to entrepreneurs who are not necessarily gay, the films by a local business improvement group Vauxhall One, but it seems certain that LGBTQ+ culture created the environment where such things could happen.

It’s hard to prove that gay culture reduces crime but Inspector Mark McLellan, lead LGBT liaison officer of Lambeth Borough Police, says: “As an experienced police officer with 14 years’ service, I cannot recall a time where there has been a pub fight in an LGBT venue in Lambeth. But I would however encourage all members of the community to report crime to the police no matter what.”

Certainly, becoming a gaybourhood hastens the gentrification of a London district, injecting energy and cash and — inevitably — raising house prices. “Gay couples have a greater earning ability than other couples,” says Mandy Burrows of estate agent Ludlow Thompson, “and in a market where sealed bids are common, many gay couples offer higher prices for properties and thus secure them.” The Government estimated in 2013 that the introduction of gay marriage would itself add £18 million to the British economy.

The arc of a London gaybourhood goes like this. Either a residential community settles around a knot of businesses (ie, clubs and bars), or vice versa. As properties are refurbished and the area becomes more desirable, more mainstream businesses move in to capitalise on footfall and spend, and rents start to rise (witness the arrival of Nando’s and Dirty Burger alongside the fetish club Hoist in Vauxhall). Eventually, new arrivals attracted by the “vibrancy” of the area start to object to late club licences (as some fear will happen with the arrival of the American embassy near Vauxhall at Nine Elms).

As prices skyrocket, those members of the community who can’t afford to stay sell up and move on to the next “undiscovered” ’hood. “Christopher Street in New York used to be gay but because it’s so close to Wall Street they have been priced out,” says Steve Coote of the Gay Business Association. “Those who created that gay village couldn’t help but take the money and run.” Something similar has largely happened here in Soho, where the rump of gay culture has been touristified.

In an interview for Pridelife magazine, Joshua Rafter, managing director of the gay property service Outlet, said: “I’ve seen gay villages appear and disperse. When I first started in property 16 years ago, Earl’s Court was the main gay enclave in London, then people seemed to head to Islington. Then Soho came up around the same time and the latest gay village to arrive in London is Vauxhall, although throughout that time there’s also been a big lesbian community living in Hackney.”

So gaybourhoods move on, and they are also increasingly hard to identify. Because the things that the LGBTQ+ community is supposed to appreciate — an interesting home, green space, cafés and good food shops, lively culture, clubs — are the same things most liberal, right-thinking, switched-on straight Londoners appreciate too. “In the same way that there used to be gay media, now you can read about gays everywhere. That commercial commonality is also becoming diluted,” says Ben Summerskill, former chief executive of Stonewall. “Part of that is because you have gay bars or clubs now where straight people want to go because of the atmosphere, and gay people who want to go to straight venues and kiss their partner on the dancefloor, which they couldn’t 30 years ago.” The nicest places to live in London are all a bit gay, therefore.

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