The Royal Vauxhall Tavern is a legendary LGBTQ venue in South London that has been the cornerstone of London and the UK’s queer culture since at least the 1940s. After the pub was bought by an Austrian based property developer, I helped to start the RVTFuture campaign. In spite of various professional and personal dilemmas, we helped to achieve Grade II listed status for the venue. The RVT is now the first site in the UK officially recognised for its significance to LGBTQ culture.1
Royal Vauxhall Tavern
Mother
I found taking the Masters in Architecture at The Royal College of Art in 2010 both crippling and liberating. It suited my dark sense of humour, with briefs open to the dystopic and weird, pulling at the threads of what was acceptable in the ‘real world’. By nature a pessimist and cynic, there was always an unfathomable gap between the vision in my head and getting it across to a tutor who had seen 12 other personal struggles beforehand in a dank, windowless room, fuelled by coffee and phone calls from their office. The only air coming in was from a fire door propped open with a copy of OMA’s S, M, L, XL.
There are those that excel at this and go on to win prizes and build popup shops or guerrilla gardens. But imposing some middle class ideal of living in a community who just need to know they’re not going to be evicted is key. A community can do little to influence their future when a developer and the local council team up to demolish their block, only to replace it with private pocketsized flats. So I did what any recent Part II graduate would do with the recession still raging: I took the first job I was offered, with no contract. I began working for an architect/developer in Southwark in an office of five or six other contract-free graduates. The idea of designing and developing our own houses seemed so appealing at first. You have no client and you have to have pretty bad luck not to be able to make money from London property.
Conversely you are constantly trying to bridge loans leveraged from another site you have just got planning for in order to fund the next one, getting planning for that, and getting another loan to pay off the last one, permissions expiring and panic ensuing when a lender calls in its money. It soon becomes a never-ending cycle of site as commodity. I was no different to an estate agent, simply facilitating loans. I was spending more time dealing with barristers and banks than builders.
There was a spate of development opportunities coming through from the director, who was often cruising for sites on his bicycle. He would give me an address and I would go through my checklist. It became a skill, using a Mini Cooper parked outside the site on Google Street View to work out its dimensions. Seeing how many flats could fit without triggering any affordable housing quotas. Then the boss would randomly stab at his calculator and mutter under his breath, ‘Interesting…’ Weeks later I would discover that he had bought the site and suffer stomach churning tension wondering if I had got the numbers right.
Realness
In January 2014 I was given 372 Kennington Lane, SE11. I knew this was Vauxhall, which meant I wouldn’t have to roam the backwaters of Peckham for a change. A search for the address came up with The Royal Vauxhall Tavern. I am a Londoner but, having been an architecture student since my early 20s, I hadn’t been out much. My weekends were usually spent procrastinating and watching repeats of RuPaul’s Drag Race, but I had been to the RVT.2
If you are anywhere on the LGBTQ spectrum and living in London, you have likely heard of the RVT. A series of regular club nights interspersed with experimental performance pieces, some spectacular, some bizarre, but never dull, and made all the more intriguing by being set within a Victorian pub. Famously the site of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens from the 1660s to 1859 and once part of a larger Victorian terrace, this last man standing is all that was left after clearing the slum of an estate and returning the area to parkland. Inside there is a bar, a few cast iron columns, and a small raised stage with red velvet curtains stapled to the proscenium. It is well known for the diversity of its punters, making it uniquely easy-going. Unlike many gay clubs where there is only one objective, there is no pressure to conform. It’s so poorly laid out and incredibly busy you often end up drenched in beer by the end of the night. It has been a testing ground for art and performances that later infiltrated mainstream culture. Boogaloo Stu showcased his talents here before working with the likes of Kylie and Björk. David Hoyle and his beautifully crafted rants induce tears, laughter, and vomiting. Paul O’Grady graced the stage as Lilly Savage. At the height of the AIDS crisis she was arrested during a raid by policemen wearing rubber gloves, terrified of catching anything from the punters.
My director informed me that the agent he deals with had forwarded him the information pack as he was a ‘special client’. The sale was not happening on the open market. I knew that if they were talking to someone like my employer, this was bad news. Going by his previous dealings, there was a good chance that once acquired he would stipulate vacant possession and the RVT would languish empty for years. The director knew I was gay but I wasn’t sure of his motives by giving me this task. My sexuality had never been an issue in the workplace before but now I was confronted with a professional and personal dilemma. If the RVT was sold there would be an uproar: this was London’s oldest and most loved alternative venue. At the time, the Joiners’ Arms on Hackney Road had closed to make way for an AHMM scheme and Russell Brand was jumping on the bandwagon for the New Era estate in Hoxton.3 4 The public had only just become aware of, and disgusted by, the growing number of ‘poor doors’, and there was a mounting sense of injustice in the city.5
I had a duty to complete the task I was given. I also had a duty not to see another piece of my city destroyed, or sit empty for decades earning interest for a hedge fund. I went over to him with my scribbles and massing diagrams and calmly told him he needed to be sure what he was doing with this one. It wasn’t going to be a quick ‘buy it, get planning, sell it on’ job. I impressed upon him how important this place was to the LGBTQ community and that I remembered hearing about an attempt in the 1990s by Lambeth Council to develop the RVT and park into a shopping centre that was met with ferocious opposition and scrapped.
Whenever his mobile rang, I could tell he was having an excited discussion with the agent. He would go softly spoken and leave the room to carry on his conversation in the corridor. Fortunately, the corridor outside had poor acoustics and amplified the phone conversation to the extent that I could hear the person on the other end of the line. It would be a high risk venture but securing planning would increase the land value several times over. Especially now Vauxhall, Nine Elms and Battersea had got planning for a cluster of gleaming towers surrounding the new American Embassy.
I questioned every decision when putting pen to paper. Do I round this area down to make it a less attractive prospect? I thought the most ethical way forward was to be as neutral as possible and to make sure the director knew that, should he win the RVT bid, he would not easily be able to deal with the backlash. We wouldn’t just be dealing with a few retirees next door with lots of free time on their hands. The backlash would be city-wide and fierce.
Category: Town and Country
Through contacting the consultants involved with getting the imposing Vauxhall Nine Elms development through planning, the director organised a high-level meeting with Lambeth Planning: a kind of pre-pre-application meeting. I pulled together a presentation, grabbing images of bare-chested revellers and drag queens at the RVT. I joked with my director that they would be picketing outside our office, posting glitter bombs through the letter box. Those gathered at the meeting were in shock. Throughout they struggled to remain impartial, highlighting the problems any developer would face. Most couldn’t understand why the RVT was for sale at all: Lambeth Council now had a good relationship with the venue, holding local hustings there, and with many of Lambeth’s employees enjoying a night at the RVT themselves. Coming away from the planning office I felt reprieved. My director now realised I wasn’t being melodramatic.
His short attention span meant he swiftly moved on to other schemes. Weeks later, a document sat on the printer next to discarded copies of our payslips: a contract for the terms of sale of the RVT. He was offering a terrifying amount of money and stipulated vacant possession. It was a situation that could quickly become disastrous for the RVT and I was angry that I was in a position do something but was held back by a multitude of conflicting thoughts.
There have been many discussions in the architecture profession about ethics and morality. These are often related to architectural practice in countries that have a woeful record of safety and human rights on construction sites. Alejandro Aravena’s Pritzker-Prize-winning statement that ‘architects do not have the moral duty to do good’ sees the architect as a skilled problem solver whose work should result in good being done regardless of any sense of morality. But at that moment I felt a professional and moral dilemma. Was it right to blow the whistle on the sale? I would certainly have been sacked. If it was known that I was the sort of person to undermine the practice I worked for, would I struggle to find another job? Being labelled a ‘troublemaker’ early in my career was not appealing. If I had had a contract, there would surely have been a clause preventing me from revealing deals my practice was involved in.
The Architects’ Journal published a survey in August 2015 revealing that aspects of the construction industry are riddled with difficulties for those who identify as LGBTQ.6 Would interfering with my director’s business and bringing my sexuality to the fore count against me? I have never knowingly been judged professionally because of my sexuality. I do feel the architecture profession is a ‘boys’ club’ that is reinforced by bodies such as RIBA, and even here it is perhaps easier to get on as a gay white male than a woman. Still, as the 2015 AJ survey revealed, among the construction industry architects are the most accepting of diversity, but architects don’t work in isolation.
In fear of my litigious employer I decided I would do nothing until the sale went public. Weeks passed as I scanned social media outlets for any news. I couldn’t understand how the secret sale hadn’t been leaked. If I knew it was happening, and was on the cusp of exposing it, then surely there were others. But perhaps they were in the same predicament as I was, but in less tolerant environments.
House
My director came up to me one afternoon to say he had pulled out of the bidding process. He didn’t often inform us when he had failed in a bid but he knew it was something I would want to know.
Not being that involved in the gay scene, I didn’t know many people who would be able to do something about it. What if those involved with the RVT knew about the sale and were in on it? One of the RVT nights I attended occasionally was called Duckie,7 a club night running for more than 20 years and featuring the weird and experimental, run by a collection of the same. One founding member usually present on a Duckie night is Amy Lamé. I spent the rest of that afternoon writing a very careful email, still unsure if she was aware of the sale. I outlined what information I had and suggested steps that might help delay it, including an application form to have the RVT registered as a community asset.
Amy called and we arranged to meet up on the South Bank one evening with her co-Duckie member, Simon Casson. They were shocked to hear what I had to say. While other venues struggled, business at the RVT seemed to be booming. During our conversation they must have thought me a strange character. I was paranoid someone I knew would appear, or that my director would show up. I played it very ‘straight’, trying to deal only with the facts, and made sure I didn’t infer anything. For all I knew the RVT owners may have decided not to sell and I didn’t want to be responsible for destroying any relations Duckie had with them by spreading rumours.
We met again, this time with a lawyer, a heritage expert, promoters, performers, and long-time regulars of the RVT in attendance. We formed a group called RVTFuture. They were concerned with what had happened since I had met Amy and Simon. The RVT had been bought by an Austria-based developer, Immovate. Looking at their website, they had a track record of taking beautiful historic buildings across Europe and converting them into bland hotels, offices, and apartments. They didn’t have a portfolio of successful gay clubs, so we assumed the worse.
Legendary
My pessimism came in handy as the devil’s advocate on the RVTFuture committee. Whenever there was a glimmer of hope, I’d suggest a way the new owners could avoid trouble, or shut the place down. Trawling through deeds and records of company ownership, it became evident that the recently obtained asset of community value status was meaningless. The RVT wasn’t sold, triggering the open bidding process. Instead the company that held it as an asset was given a new board of directors and control was simply passed to the new owners.
It was decided very quickly that we would apply to Historic England to have the RVT listed.8 That would at least scupper any plans to demolish it if the asset of community value wasn’t enough to prevent the RVT turning into a Starbucks. Protectionism can kill off opportunities to create more viable futures for a building. Perhaps the RVT would benefit from being adapted to support a more diverse crowd or create a better experience. But with the imminent threat of closure, listing was the only option.
Ben Walters, a journalist and critic doing a PhD in queer culture, led the listing application: a substantial document outlining the history of the RVT and its uniqueness as an incubator for alternative performance. As the resident building expert, I was tasked with writing a report on how the shoddily refurbished 1980s interior was of historic significance. Regurgitating Foucault’s theory of heterotopias wasn’t going to help in getting a heavily stained pine bar listed.9
As my report was submitted in Ben’s application, the formidable PR machine of RVTFuture went into overdrive. Members of Parliament, Greater London Authority members, the Mayor, celebrities, historians, and academics all wrote to Historic England in support of the application. We knew the owners had hired a heritage consultant to counter our argument, so we ensured our submission was a very serious piece of work. I did my best to muster up all the architects I could think of who would support us. An impressive array of professionals took time to add their names and write in with their own reasons why the RVT should be listed. It went some way in reassuring me that I wasn’t the only person in the industry who cared or would take a risk supporting an LGBTQ institution.
The day Historic England announced the positive outcome of our application was momentous. It was the first building ever to be given Grade II status based on its LGBTQ history.10 RVTFuture members were doing TV and radio interviews; the Heritage Minister was even forgiven for being a Conservative for the day. The irony was not lost on us: we had sought statutory recognition from a body not always associated with the more progressive aspects of society. We were buzzing in the days that followed. There were drinks and speeches at the RVT, to the annoyance of the owners whose investment had just had its value slashed in half.
Shade
Since the listing, the focus of RVTFuture has been on bringing the RVT into community ownership. My expertise has been needed less as I have no idea how to run a pub. The experience was vital in shaping how I practise and I am lucky that I am in a profession that requires its members to have a strong sense of one’s self. Being a gay white man I know I have it easier in comparison to others in the LGBTQ community. Even within RVTFuture it was acknowledged that people who identify as trans, bi, of an ethnic minority, or functionally diverse, were underrepresented.
Gender diversity transcends economic and cultural origins; acceptance does not. Institutions will always contain remnants of their boys’ club beginnings, so I believe it’s best to reimagine these organisations rather than force them to assimilate diversity. There are similarities with the legalisation of gay marriage. In the UK, the debate was about allowing same sex couples into the institution of marriage, but the institution itself hasn’t changed. We are supposed to feel placated because we now have equality in an aspect of everyday life. The rules have failed to change; we are merely allowed to follow them. My view is that once those in positions of power retire or die off, these changes will happen incrementally as a younger generation comes through. But it is essential that governing bodies, practices, and individuals now allow themselves to be fundamentally rewritten and not just accept people of ‘otherness’ into their establishments.