Our heritage · LGBTQIA+ history
LGBTQIA+ Heritage Report
How The Yard became one of the first of a new kind of open, proud gay bar in 1993 – and why its courtyard and loft still tell that story today.
Heritage report · Robert Bevan, 2016
The Yard's LGBTQIA+ Heritage
Written by heritage consultant Robert Bevan in 2016 as part of an appeal to have The Yard listed. It sets out the LGBTQ+ significance of the building and is meant to be read alongside the architectural reports.
About the author
Robert Bevan is a private heritage consultant with qualifications in architecture, town planning and urban design. He was formerly a conservation and urban design officer at Westminster City Council, at one point responsible for Soho. He worked on Historic England's Pride of Place programme on LGBTQ heritage and, as a volunteer, with the community team that secured Grade II listing for the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. He has also written about cultural and social issues for the gay and mainstream press, and is the author of The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War, which explores how identity is tied to place.
Why this report was written
The report followed an initial refusal of an application to list 57 Rupert Street. It brought forward new evidence of The Yard's importance and its LGBTQ significance that was not available during the first assessment.
The world The Yard opened into
The Yard opened on 2 June 1993, at first under two names: the Loft for the upper bar and the Courtyard for the ground floor and the historic open yard reached through the arch from Rupert Street.
This was a time of great change for LGBTQ communities in the UK, and Soho was at the centre of it. Sex between men had been partly decriminalised more than twenty years earlier, but attitudes towards lesbians and gay men did not shift much until the late 1980s. In the early 1990s an equal age of consent was still years away, and civil partnerships or same-sex marriage were barely imagined. Many LGBTQ people still lived hidden lives, or were "out" only to some people, perhaps friends but not colleagues.
The arrival of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, and the community's response in care, treatment, information and campaigning, helped spark a new visibility and identity. In a life-or-death situation, silence was not an option. At the same time, Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which many activists saw as an attempt to suppress the community's growing visibility, had the opposite effect and raised awareness of LGBTQ issues.
From the late 1980s this new campaigning energy and openness began to change how lesbians and gay men used space in the city, especially socially. Until then, gay venues had mostly stayed discreet. Many pubs and clubs had "private party" notices on the door to discourage outsiders. Patrons often had to knock to get in, and windows, where they existed at all, were blocked or kept behind closed blinds for anonymity and safety. This was true even of well-known venues such as the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.
London had a few small clusters of gay venues, in Islington, Soho and Earl's Court for example. They were often run-down traditional pubs in semi-hidden, marginal spots, with drag shows or club nights for entertainment. Little more than a year before The Yard opened, Soho had perhaps only four dedicated LGBTQ venues, including two traditional pubs, Comptons on Old Compton Street and the King's Arms on Poland Street, both still open today. Within a few years, dozens of bars, cafés, shops and other businesses had opened in Soho and beyond.
A new lifestyle and a new kind of venue
Looking back, 1993 was a pivotal year for new lesbian and gay identities, and for new kinds of venue that embodied a proud, confident and more open way of life. This was reflected in the idea of the "pink pound": the recognition that LGBTQ communities had spending power and that businesses could profitably serve them. The mainstream media soon gave it a lot of coverage.
Entrepreneurs such as Gordon Lewis and his Village Group were among the first to respond to this new reality and help shape it. In 1990 Lewis opened the short-lived Village in a hidden basement on Hanway Street. He soon realised that LGBTQ lives were changing, and in 1991 he opened a new Village on the corner of Wardour Street and Old Compton Street. Its plate-glass windows showed pride rather than shame, though inside it was still essentially a pub, if a stripped-back, contemporary one. Around the same time the Edge opened in Soho Square and Lewis created The Yard. In Manchester, Manto opened on Canal Street with big glass windows in what became the city's gay village. Similar bars followed, in Soho and beyond.
The newly founded weeklies The Pink Paper and its lighter sister title Boyz ("Gay Life! Gay Style!") covered these changes. They carried adverts for new LGBT businesses, such as Ivan Massow Associates, which offered financial services to people often turned away by "straight" providers. That autumn, the second Gay Lifestyles show at Olympia drew 20,000 visitors, and Angels in America opened at the National Theatre in November 1993.
That same month Boyz interviewed Gordon Lewis under the headline "The Sultan of Soho", praising him for "a sophisticated alternative to the traditional pub scene". Lewis remembered: "You could tell a gay pub because the blinds were always down!" He added: "We were hoping that one day there would be a defined gay area in London." Two months earlier, the paper had profiled his business partner Gary Henshaw, whose new consultancy was the first gay business consultancy in the country, timed perfectly for "the pink pound's buoyancy and the rapid expansion of the gay scene in areas such as Soho".
In May 1994 The Independent on Sunday reported the rise of Soho as the UK's first gay village. Journalist Mark Simpson wrote that after property prices collapsed in the early-1990s recession, "the gays moved in", and called Lewis "the architect of the pinking of Soho". Lewis explained: "I tried to pursue the continental idea. I wanted to get away from... the gay pub thing in particular: shuttered, dark premises, all-male service, alcohol only. I thought, let's introduce colours, plate-glass windows, American style service, bar-girls as well as boys, cappuccinos, good food." Simpson described a younger generation that saw being gay not as a problem but as something to celebrate.
Writing in London From Punk to Blair, Mark W. Turner quoted activist Chris Wood on gay men rejecting the old blacked-out pubs in favour of "brash confidence, designer interiors and showcase windows". Turner asked whether there was anywhere else a gay couple could feel completely at ease holding hands or kissing in the street. "Is the transformation of Soho the single most significant aspect of gay London? I think it is."
Paradoxically, this newly claimed safe space also made Soho a target. On 30 April 1999 a nail bomb exploded at the Admiral Duncan on Old Compton Street, killing three people and injuring around 70. Police had already warned that a gay bar could be the bomber's next target, and The Yard put up a poster asking customers to stay alert.
The Yard opens
The opening was anticipated for months. "The Loft is Coming," announced Boyz in April 1993. The Loft and the Courtyard were marketed separately for the first few months before coming together as The Yard. The bar replaced small shop units, including Condomania, a condom shop promoting safer sex in the age of HIV/AIDS.
Like the Village Group's other venues, The Yard deliberately had a New York feel, but this time in more than just its name. The upstairs Loft bar referred not only to the old hayloft but to the bare-brick, cast-iron-columned lofts that artists were starting to occupy in lower Manhattan. Those features survive at The Yard alongside exceptional carpentry, joining the building's working history with the bar's loft-style look. That made it unique, unlike the slick lines of the Edge, which opened a few weeks earlier, or the pared-back pub of the Village. Instead of drag and strippers, films were screened upstairs and food and cocktails were served.
Under the headline "Yard Birds", Boyz reported that "the central London gay glitterati was out in force" for the opening, "with most leaving suitably impressed". Later that summer came the cover story "The Yard Goes Cocktail Crazy" and a food review praising a "Yard-style Caesar salad with poached quails' eggs (£4.20)", saying the food was "of a much higher 'restaurant' standard". For the second Soho Pink Weekend in May 1994, Boyz suggested visitors "drink and dine in style downstairs, enjoy movies in the Loft bar upstairs, or just lounge around... in the sunny courtyard."
The Soho Society's newsletter, the Soho Clarion, called The Yard "a delightful oasis, a refuge from traffic and social hubbub where you can sit in a quiet, pleasant courtyard and take tea in the afternoon or sample the unusual menu... or have a glass of wine in the evening."
Coverage like this should not be dismissed as trivial. For gay people, this way of life was a world away from the very recent past, when work, eating out and everyday life had been kept strictly separate from their gay selves. LGBTQ people were starting to bring together their working, social and love lives, in public, in a way heterosexual people had always taken for granted. For many it was new and genuinely liberating. The Yard was also quite different from the earlier generation of Soho venues that had partly relied on the area's tolerance as a red-light district.
From the start The Yard's crowd was different from the traditional boozer. It was more mixed in gender than most earlier gay venues, and drew people who came to socialise rather than to campaign. It marked a kind of success in the "normalisation" of gay lives, seen both by wider society and by the many LGBTQ people who simply wanted to be unremarkable members of it. That change in self-identity later fed into the call for equal marriage.
The radical campaigning groups such as OutRage! and ACT UP did not meet at The Yard. Its regulars were young professionals arriving in suits after work. Early versions of Jake, the professional networking organisation, met there, along with other networking groups. Stuart Honey remembers the Communication Group, one of the first gay professional networks for people in the media, meeting there in the early 1990s with visiting speakers from newspapers, radio and television.
Yannick Potter, who set up the LGBT group at Queen Mary College, recalls: "At that time in the early 90's (1993) it was a different world. Previous attempts to set up LGBT at Queen Mary College had ended in death threats and a petrol bomb being thrown through the letterbox... many of us were frightened to even go to a gay bar for fear of recriminations... We would go to the Yard as it was less threatening than other establishments and was welcoming of lesbians and our straight friends too... to have an oasis, like the Yard bar, to enjoy in a really pleasant way then and also now I would argue is extremely important."
A survey of Yard patrons in early 2016 found many other groups that met or started there, including the Gay Police Association, LGBT Christian Outreach, Gay Marathon Runners and LGBT networks from universities, the British Museum, the Alzheimer's Society and Interlaw. They show The Yard's special character as a meeting place for a new phase of LGBTQ culture, a world away from the lip-synching and burlesque of earlier venues.
Why The Yard is historically important
The Yard was one of the first of this new type of LGBTQ venue, and its building expresses the new "out and proud" spirit far more fully than other surviving bars of the period. With doors opening onto a courtyard visible from the street, it claimed a right to public space, even if a gated one. It was open yet protected, a precaution the later Admiral Duncan bombing showed was still necessary. It also remains a rarity in the UK as a gay bar with outdoor space.
The Village nearby is a few months older, but it does not combine open form and function in the same way, and its interior has changed many times while The Yard's has stayed largely the same. Other café bars of the time, such as First Out on St Giles High Street, The Box on Upper St Martin's Lane and the Fallen Angel in Islington, have all closed.
Like the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, The Yard is a unique survivor. It represents a crucial period in LGBTQ history, and the making of modern LGBTQ identities, in a building of special architectural interest. Its history as an LGBTQ venue is shorter than some traditional pubs', but if age were the only test, it would count against LGBTQ sites that, for social and legal reasons, are relatively recent. Older venues such as the RVT do not represent this equally important later period of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The closure of many LGBTQ venues in Soho and across London shows how fragile and rare this heritage is. In hindsight, the "gay village" flourished for only a few decades, so it matters that the best remaining evidence of this short but far-reaching social change is recognised before it disappears.
Professor Matt Cook of Birkbeck, University of London, a historian of queer culture, supported the listing application: "The Yard represents a particular turn in LGBT history, community and politics – a new set of aspirations amidst the pressing contexts of the AIDS crisis. It was a haven of sorts – something indeed reflected in its architecture and layout. That it is also part of wider shifts in Soho culture around this time makes it all the more significant."
The building therefore has strong historic interest for its link to a turning point in late-20th-century LGBTQ cultural and social history. Its architecture captures that moment, and it adds to Soho's cultural identity in a way that would be lost if its use and form were insensitively changed. Historic England concluded that the impact of Raymond's clubs on 1960s Soho was not permanently captured in their building. The Yard, by contrast, captures a turning point in LGBTQ life in its very fabric and spaces.
The combination of unusual architectural quality with historic and communal value is not shared by other LGBTQ bars of the period, such as the Village or the Edge in Soho, or Manto in Manchester. LGBTQ heritage needs to be identified, recorded, understood, cared for and celebrated as part of our national story, so that more people can see themselves valued in their local environment. The Yard has communal as well as historic value: a place that holds meaning and memories for people, and a place of social interaction, community and culture.
Protecting only older venues like the RVT, at the time still the only site listed partly for its LGBT history, would skew the surviving record of LGBTQ history towards earlier culture such as drag, at the expense of more recent but equally far-reaching changes. As Historic England said of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern: "Where a case can be made for special architectural and historic interest, as is here in combination, listing must be recommended."
Sources quoted in the report
- Boyz, 5 June, 31 July, 14 August, 4 September and 20 November 1993; 21 May 1994
- The Pink Paper, 10 September and 26 November 1993
- Mark Simpson, "Hello Boys", The Independent on Sunday, 22 May 1994
- Soho Clarion, Autumn 1994
- Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson (eds), London From Punk to Blair, Reaktion Books, 2003
- Simon Edge, "Look Back in Anger", Gay Times
- Historic England, listing advice for the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, case 1424488, 20 July 2015
- Recollections sent to the author by patrons, and a survey of Yard customers, February–March 2016
Source: Robert Bevan – LGBTQ heritage report on The Yard, 57 Rupert Street, prepared for the listing appeal, March 2016.
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