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But when you leave, you get a lot more old-school venues that have been going since the 80s and have a heavily male clientele.”įlyers collected by Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings … The Scarcity of Liberty #2. London has a totally different clubbing culture, which is a lot more focused on queer-inclusive space. And it’s really dependent on where you are in the country. “A lot of our work looks at this shifting moment between what I would call ‘gay bars’ and a more queer identity. Quinlan sees gay spaces changing, but not everywhere. Burr is based in New York, and Quinlan and Hastings travelled to 11 cities around the UK to collect flyers, health advice leaflets, and other ephemera from LGBT bars, which they present in a work The Scarcity of Liberty #2. Each is concerned in some way with how LGBT culture plays out in the physical world, and how queer people navigate and leave their mark on the city. In the Whitechapel exhibition, archival material sits alongside work from a range of queer artists including Tom Burr, Evan Ifekoya, duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings and Prem Sahib. In 2018, a campaign to set up a new community centre in east London raised £102,000, and efforts continue, albeit on a voluntary basis. Although enough cash was raised to buy the building in 1989, it closed a couple of years later, leaving London, in contrast to New York and Paris, without any such facility. The abolition of the GLC by Margaret Thatcher, who had previously said the council’s spending on minorities was “a disgraceful waste of money” represented a huge financial blow. There was mismanagement “at all levels, from volunteers who thought it was fine to let their friends eat for free, to bar deliveries where half the stock went straight into someone’s car”. “The centre was run by total amateurs chosen for their political categories or beliefs and not for being able to run a successful social or commercial undertaking,” one former visitor told Vice magazine in 2016. If this all sounds like a blissful utopia, the reality might occasionally have been different. Photograph: Courtesy Hall-Carpenter Archives and UCL Urban Laboratory Others have sought designation as “assets of community value” or heritage listing to secure their future.Ĭlosed … a diary from the London Lesbian and Gay Centre. The losses have included fixtures of the London scene: the Coleherne in Earl’s Court, which had been going since the 1930s Islington’s oldest gay pub, the King Edward IV, and the Black Cap in Camden, which closed in 2015 after 50 years. “That didn’t really come up so much in the research we did … We noticed that, in a lot of the cases, there was a link to some kind of larger-scale development, or small-scale luxury residential development.” “Some of the media narratives were around technology and Gaydar, Grindr, how that’s changed everything,” says Campkin. The phenomenon defies easy explanation, but changing habits and the city’s seemingly unstoppable economic growth play a part. From 2006 to 2017, the number of LGBT clubs, bars and performance spaces in London dropped dramatically, from 121 to 51. Work led by Campkin at University College London’s Urban Laboratory has shown that nightlife, in particular, has been hit hard. The exhibition comes at a time of crisis for LGBT venues. Headspace … performer Tom Kendall sports a Black Cap-shaped hat. They have been analysing the changing landscape of the queer community in London since 2016, and dragged up once again in front of the press at the Whitechapel Gallery to mark the opening of Queer Spaces: London, 1980s–Today. The event had been organised by the architecture academics Ben Campkin and Lo Marshall as a riff on the famous 1931 Beaux Arts Ball in New York, at which attendees dressed as the Chrysler building and the Waldorf Astoria hotel. They were London’s queer spaces, past and present.
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The models didn’t represent buildings of any great distinction, but to members of the audience they were a familiar lineup: the Black Cap, the Joiners Arms, the Glass Bar, the Lesbian and Gay Centre. Each performer was wearing an architectural model on their head, and instead of lip-syncing, they were reading out snippets of planning and licensing documents. A lot of work had gone into the costumes, but these were not of the kind you’d expect: there were no rhinestones or wigs. O n a summer’s day in 2017, in gardens near the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London, an unusual drag show took place.