In Queer Premises: LGBTQ+ Venues in London Since the 1980s, Ben Campkin critically engages with popular narratives about London's LGBTQ+ commercial establishments: where they are found, how they are used, who defends them against threats, and why they close. By paying close attention to the ways that LGBTQ+ people have created and sustained premises in the city since the 1980s, Campkin reveals a complex pattern of emergence, closure, and reinvention. This complexity disrupts claims about both the neoliberal destruction of LGBTQ+ venues, and celebrations of their purported redundancy in the era of so-called inclusivity. Responding to a gap in existing analysis, in Queer Premises Campkin seeks to connect queer studies’ more abstract debates with urban studies’ attention to materiality.
Indeed, Campkin uses the first substantive chapter of this volume to bring urban studies and queer theory into dialogue, arguing for a transdisciplinary and methodologically wide-ranging investigation of queer space. From a brief review of the sexual geographies scholarship that examines links between LGBTQ+ communities and urban change, Campkin moves on to trace the significance that place holds for key queer theorists, from Jack Halberstam to José Esteban Muñoz. His engagement with the contestations between anti-social and utopian tendencies in recent queer theorizing, along with the development of the concept of queer infrastructure, both provide the building blocks for the remainder of the book and suggest important new directions for queer urban studies as a field.
The following seven chapters are empirically driven: Campkin draws on archival material, media and policy analysis, and contemporary interviews to chart the dynamic relationships between LGBTQ+ communities, venues, planning processes, and governance structures in London. In chapter 2 we are taken back to the landmark establishment of the London Lesbian and Gay Centre in the early 1980s, finding tensions over the commodification of LGBTQ+ venues and the varying needs and desires of different user groups that will be familiar to contemporary readers. Chapter 3 provides a thoughtful analysis of the opportunities and constraints presented by changes in the leadership at local and national government. Through an examination of the kind of meanings attributed to LGBTQ+ venues in the press and amongst LGBTQ+ people, chapter 4 then critically unpacks the common explanations given for the closure of a significant number of LGBTQ+ venues between the late 2000s to the mid-2010s and considers whether this evidences an overarching trend toward disappearance, or merely the ebb and flow that is inherent to the life of cafes, clubs, and bars in the city. This line of inquiry continues in chapter 5, where Campkin traverses clusters of LGBTQ+ venues around Kings Cross and Tottenham Court Road to scrutinize the impact that major infrastructure-led redevelopment initiatives have had. Engaging with the emergence of campaigns to protect two of London's most distinctive venues, the Black Cap and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, Campkin then focuses in on the way that the idea of heritage has been animated by activists, developers, and planning officials in chapter 6, bringing this into contrast, in chapter 7, with campaigns that have instead turned to a language of diversity to defend venues. As Campkin shows here, negotiations around the inclusivity or exclusivity of LGBTQ+ venues inevitably raise complex questions about marginality, power, and subjectivity. In place of a conclusion, chapter 8 brings the book to a close with reflections on the impact that the Covid-19 pandemic had in the short term, as well as the more durational shifts that it may have catalyzed.
Throughout Queer Premises Campkin's own location, both as a gay man who moved to London in the mid-90s, and as professor of urbanism at the Bartlett School of Architecture, is apparent: the venues under discussion are treated fondly and their cultural and social significance foregrounded, but the nostalgia that could have marked this study is curtailed by his careful attention to the dynamism of the city. By revealing the ways in which LGBTQ+ communities have harnessed urban policy, planning, and heritage practices to create and sustain the buildings that foster queer life in London, Campkin counters the—perhaps overdetermined—association between queer and anti-establishment praxis. Politicized planning regulations, development strategies, and urban governance are identified here as creating the conditions in which LGBTQ+ venues are not only threatened and marginalized but also established and defended, in sometimes unanticipated and surprising ways.
As Campkin acknowledges, his decision to focus on commercial venues in Queer Premises does mean that the book can provide only a partial description of London's queer infrastructure and the practices that sustain it. Although gestured toward within this volume, further work is needed to unpack the conceptual and material effects of an association between LGBTQ+ placemaking, queer sexuality, and the night. Has this been affected by the changes to equalities law in the UK, and what happens when LGBTQ+ venues transgress this temporal boundary and emerge into the daylight? This avenue of research may also better reflect the placemaking of those more impoverished, racialized, and/or disabled LGBTQ+ people, whose queer infrastructure is less visible in the built environment.
In all, Queer Premises provides a valuable account of London's commercial venues, which will be of interest to both scholars and practitioners of LGBTQ+ placemaking. Campkin makes good use of a range of qualitative materials to offer something of a history of the present for LGBTQ+ placemaking in London, usefully setting the ground for ongoing work to identify and evaluate the conditions, strategies, and measures that constitute success for LGBTQ+ commercial venues across different geographical contexts.
