Well hello Voho: Vauxhall's star is rising

Cafés, bars, funky apartments and famous gay clubs - as Soho loses its cool, Vauxhall is shaping up as London’s next happening location. Nick Curtis looks at SW8’s up and coming attractions
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For decades it was central London’s neglected riverside district, blighted by roads and railway lines. Now Vauxhall has become VoHo, London’s freshest destination, its new name bestowed by the gay community that has deserted Soho and driven the regeneration of SW8.

A combination of gays, the nearby Portuguese community and early-adopters who appreciated the Thames-side location and proximity to both the City and West End have provoked a flowering of cafés, bars, funky (and not so funky) apartments and, most famously, gay clubs. It has been named, along with Greenwich, as a flagship location for Boris Johnson’s Go Dutch initiative to promote walking and cycling.

Last month, the area received the capital’s traditional seal of cool approval, when Kate Moss agreed to spin the decks alongside Boy George and DJ Fat Tony at Deelooded, the latest club night at the newest venue, Covert. True, she didn’t actually turn up, but when Moss musters sufficient interest to snub your postcode, you know it’s arrived.

The promoter Orange Nation runs up to nine predominantly gay events a week in the clubs Fire, Area, Lightbox and Covert, underneath the railway arches by Vauxhall station. “We don’t do anything in Soho, where it’s all about sitting around and having a drink,” says marketing manager Jonny Marsh. “The licensing is very strict there so nothing stays open past 3am, which is early for a club.”

Photographer Adrian Lourie concurs. “Vauxhall has much more of a cool London vibe,” he says. “It’s less pretentious and fashion-oriented. Soho has been de-gayed in the past two years, with places like Barcode closing and mainstream chains like Leon and Caffè Nero moving into Old Compton Street.”

In Vauxhall, he says, there is something to cater to every taste. It is where Barcode’s bear nights found a new home. The huge Fire and Area cater to a clubby, gym-toned crowd whereas Lightbox is more cool and loungey. Also under the arches is Hoist, which services a hardcore leather and fetish scene; Protocol, which aims to attract the elite; and a branch of the Chariots Roman Spa sauna chain.

Near the tunnel clubs, a mere ball’s thwack from the Oval cricket ground, is the Eagle pub, site of various notorious nights including Horse Meat Disco, and the venerable Royal Vauxhall Tavern, the area’s gay flagship.

“The RVT became a safe place for gay men to come after the Second World War,” says the venue’s entertainment programmer Catia Carrico. More recently it has carved out a niche for good old-fashioned and alternative cabaret. The RVT saw the first appearance of Paul O’Grady’s Lily Savage. Lesbian entertainer Amy Lamé hosts regular nights there, and avant-garde art/drag performer David Hoyle this month launched a new residency called Pandrogyny.

Behind the RVT lies all that is left of the 17th-century Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens hymned by Pepys, Boswell and Dickens. This meagre green space has a monolithic new pillared entrance and a small hillock known, for wittily obvious reasons, as Brokeback Mountain. It also has arguably the most visible manifestation of the area’s changing fortunes.

The Queen Anne pub, which used to offer cheap and sleazy striptease, closed after its landlady was murdered while on holiday in the Dominican Republic in 2010. It is now The Tea House Theatre, offering snacks and meals to yummy mummies during the day and artistic events in the evening. “We have a poetry night the second Friday of every month, knitting clubs and a film night every Monday,” says Hal Iggulden, the venue’s artistic director and the co-author, with his brother Conn, of The Dangerous Book for Boys.

There have even been royal sightings in Vauxhall. Prince Harry and Kate Middleton were separately enthusiastic visitors to the roller disco nights at the Renaissance Rooms on Wandsworth Road back in 2008 and 2009.

To add to the mix, the railway arches not occupied by clubs or showrooms are home to the Portuguese Casa Madeira and Pico Bar and the Italian restaurant Moratti, foodie overspill from nearby Little Lisbon on South Lambeth Road.

There are plans afoot to encourage these lively venues to put out tables on the Pleasure Gardens at the back, as well as Albert Embankment at the front, where diners can stare at the MI6 building, at Jeffrey Archer’s penthouse atop riverside Alembic House, and downstream to Westminster.

Bonnington Square, run for years by a housing association that planted a community garden and lined the streets with palm trees, is now home not only to its original vegan café but also to the cool Bonnington Square Bed and Breakfast and a lovely deli, Italo, run by Mark and Arabella Boxer’s eldest son Charlie with the scion of the south London de Lieto baking clan.

On Clapham Road, a ghastly old man’s pub, The Greyhound, has reopened as the Brown Derby, drawing a younger crowd with DJs, cocktails, bare brick walls and mismatched gewgaws.

The people behind the Scootercaffe bar on Lower Marsh in Waterloo have refurbished the defunct greasy spoon Cable Café and Bar on Brixton Road, putting in vintage furniture and espresso machines to match the magnificent existing wall mural and tiled frontage. A new and devoted young clientele duly materialised out of thin air. “To me, it’s a super spot,” says owner Craig O’Dwyer. “We’ve signed a 20-year lease as an indication of our belief in the area.”

At the heart of the new Vauxhall is one of its oldest buildings, Brunswick House. This magnificent but long-derelict Georgian mansion, built in 1758, is being run as a showroom and gradually restored by architectural salvage firm Lassco. In 2010 its concert hall built for the edification of railwaymen was opened as the Brunswick House Café by Jackson Boxer, brother of Charlie. It’s pretty much a paradigm of London eating now: short, seasonal menu; keen pricing; laid-back atmosphere; young, funky staff and patrons.

Part of the joy of a visit is the incongruity: the beautiful building faces Vauxhall’s five-lane gyratory system and is sealed off from the riverside by the blank blocks of the massive St George Wharf development. These glassy ziggurats are home to two faceless Thames-side bars, a pier for the Thames Clipper, several Lords and MPs and, allegedly, Lee Ryan from boy band Blue. For now, the celeb count in Vauxhall is low, with its most famous locals — Joanna Lumley, Will Self, Stephen Bayley, Jay Rayner — concentrated in the handsome terraces of Kennington and Stockwell. But the international rich are already buying into the area.

Next to St George Wharf a new tower block is being erected which, when completed, will be the tallest residential building in the UK. It stands at the eastern end of London’s largest development project. The VNEB (Vauxhall, Nine Elms, Battersea) Opportunity Area embraces New Covent Garden market and stretches down to Battersea Power Station. Other megalith developments are planned or proposed along this strip, from Amin Taha’s high-density Vauxhall Sky Garden, to Richard Rogers’s Riverlight Development, to huge expansions of the Royal Mail and Sainsbury’s sites in Nine Elms, and a residential quarter around the new US Embassy. Mark Hutton of estate agent Douglas and Gordon says the first off-plan homes at Riverlight and Embassy Quarter are being offered to overseas investors ahead of British buyers.

Many Vauxhall residents have mixed feelings about this promised gold coast for foreign millionaires, and Lambeth council is preparing a planning document to make some sense of the various plans, which includes suggestions for a public square in the middle of the gyratory system and the replacement of the bus station with a new high street.

After years as a secret shared by the gay community and other cognoscenti, VoHo is coming up fast. I’d get in there quick, Kate Moss, if I were you.

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