Power to pink buildings: why Historic England is battling to save London's gay architectural heritage

London’s gay architectural heritage is disappearing under pressure from new property development. Is it time to give these haunts official protection?
Popular: the Royal Vauxhall Tavern
Robert Bevan26 June 2015

The blue plaque on Oscar Wilde’s house in Tite Street, Chelsea, records only that the playwright once lived there. It says nothing about the persecution he endured for his sexuality. Similarly, the Derbyshire house of the pioneering social reformer Edward Carpenter — a key figure in the history of gay rights — has, unlike the unassuming childhood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, no national recognition or legal protection from being destroyed. Of the hundreds of thousands of officially listed buildings, not a single one is explicitly preserved for its lesbian or gay connections.

Britain’s lesbian and gay lives have been hidden from history — necessarily so in an age of illegality but unconscionably since. Now, Historic England (formerly English Heritage) is embarking on a programme to recognise the UK’s LGBT+ heritage and to mark and, in perhaps a dozen cases, protect historic places by placing them on the national heritage list.

It could very well start with the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. The south London pub is perhaps the capital’s longest surviving gay venue and one of the oldest still in use in the world.

Once billed “the London Palladium of drag”, new ownership has brought with it potentially threatening changes. Following a community push, Historic England is now considering listing it. This would make it a criminal offence to alter or destroy it without consent. A decision is expected imminently.

The lively pub is the last link in a chain of London entertainment venues that goes back to the 17th century. It stands on the site of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, famous for centuries for its music (Handel performed there) and infamous for the debauchery of Georgian Londoners in its concealing arbours.

The listing could come in the nick of time because LGBT+ venues are rarely owned by the community they serve. In the past year in London more than a dozen have shut for good — about a third of the capital’s total — including such bars and clubs as Madame Jojo’s, The Black Cap and the Joiners Arms. Others, such as The Yard in Soho, have survived repeated plans for redevelopment.

Among those who have written to Historic England voicing their support for the listing are performers and politicians including Sir Ian McKellen, Government minister Nick Boles, shadow culture secretary Chris Bryant and Vauxhall MP Kate Hoey.

Gay icon: Sir Ian McKellen (Picture: Dave Benett)
Dave Benett

McKellen singles out the pub as a key site for lesbian and gay history. It has, he says, “been the home of the gay community through times of great change”. And, of course, it has been a place of entertainment, an experimental launching pad for cabaret acts and performers who later became mainstream. Paul O’Grady, who performed there and has also written in support of the campaign, says: “It was where Lily Savage grew to become a household name.” The pub has launched urban myths too, such as the time when Freddie Mercury and Kenny Everett reputedly butched-up Princess Diana in leather-man drag and sneaked her in.

Olivier Award-nominated director and writer Neil Bartlett confirms the pub’s place in London’s arts history: “I doubt if Nick Hytner at the National Theatre would have been quite so confident about commissioning a radical gay love story [Or You Could Kiss Me] from Handspring and me if the artists working at the Tavern had not demonstrated how forward-looking the traditions of LGBT performance have become.”

After the orchestral music faded and Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens closed in 1859, the Vauxhall Tavern became one of the first new buildings on the site in 1863. It may incorporate iron columns rescued from the garden’s pavilions.

Post-war clearances saw these Victorian buildings demolished in their turn, with only the curve-fronted pub surviving as a link across centuries of entertainment history — back through panto to queer London’s molly houses of the 18th century. Inside, the bar once famous as a stage for dancing drag queens was shifted aside in the Eighties as the venue helped pioneer flexible pub/club performance spaces.

A mural of Olympic diver Tom Daley outside the Vauxhall Tavern (Picture: Michael Matthews/Stockimo/Alamy)
Michael Matthews/Stockimo/Alamy

A number of prominent architects and academics have vouched for the Tavern’s architectural credentials, including Nigel Coates, emeritus professor of architecture at the Royal College of Art. He describes the pub as “an island of dignity in the whirling indifferent interchange that is Vauxhall. The possibility of its destruction is unthinkable, both from the architectural point of view and for its enduring popularity as an alternative venue. For London to retain its unique success, the drive for renewal needs to be offset with cultural anchors.” Quite.

Some put the slew of closures of these important cultural places down to the rise of dating sites, or the lack of need for such refuges in cosmopolitan London. But whatever the truth, it is an analysis that forgets that these places are often still busy. If it were just dating apps killing the gay scene, how come dozens of bars thrive in Paris, Berlin or even tiny Copenhagen?

Professor Coates is correct when he talks of amnesiac “renewal” because it is simply unsentimental property development that is the cause of London’s diminishing diversity. This is also true in other areas of the Anglo-Saxon world such as San Francisco and Sydney, where gay venues are under similar threat from vastly overheated property markets. Just this week, the Stonewall Inn, New York’s historic gay bar, has been declared a city landmark, providing the important precedent of a building being protected for its significance to LGBT+ history.

London’s pubs generally — gay and straight — have been particularly vulnerable to escalating residential land values but the loss of gay pubs is particularly felt because it is there that so much of British gay identity was forged, often in run-down areas or red-light districts such as Soho.

Still doing the business: revellers at the Vauxhall Tavern (Picture: Daniel Govan)
DANIEL GOVAN

In April, the Black Cap in Camden suddenly closed because its new owners want to turn its upper floors into flats. There has been shock, anger and colourful protests to save it.

Ben Walters, a writer on performance who is leading the campaign to save the Vauxhall Tavern, says of both the Black Cap and the Tavern: “They were world-famous symbols of London’s progressive, transgressive, liberal and experimental history. Both were still active on a weekly basis, producing popular, dynamic and radical art … in ways that are possible at fewer and fewer sites in London today.”

The same is true of countless other places that are vital to creative London, including the vanishing artists’ studios in the East End and the visible shift in Soho from long-standing independent businesses to chain stores and bars.

Unfortunately, while a place on the national heritage list should protect the Vauxhall Tavern from demolition, it could still be turned into another branch of Pret a Manger tomorrow and there is little, realistically, that could be done to stop it. This is because Britain’s planning rules governing change of use to buildings on our high streets have been calculatedly dismantled — boosting business, in theory, but busting history and diversity in the process.

Similarly, Soho may be a conservation area but with planning controls the weakest they have been in a generation there is precious little we can do to protect its character. Contrast this with Barcelona, where this year new rules were introduced to help protect 228 historic shops, restaurants and bars from rising rents.

London’s built heritage has long attested to our world-renowned pluralism. The places and spaces that secured that reputation are vanishing and with them the touchstones that help cement identity in a place and connect us with our shared past. In the face of the capital’s devouring property obsession we are in danger of becoming marooned from ourselves.

The Evening Standard proudly supports Pride in London, the annual festival that celebrates the capital’s LGBT+ community, which runs until Sunday. The theme of this year’s parade, on Saturday, is #PrideHeroes. You can nominate and vote for your #PrideHeroes at prideinlondon.org

Watch London Live's Pride coverage live on Saturday at 4-6pm. Freeview 8, Sky 117, Virgin 159, YouView 8

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