Richard Brunskill joined the Story Palace team at an LGBT celebration event that we held at the end of September 2017. We tapped into a rich seam of narrative history centered on The Bell pub on Pentonville Road (Now called Big Chill House, and serving a rather different demographic). The Bell was a hugely important ...
Read more
Nazmia, born in 1979, was part of the group that put on Ladyfest London, a feminist music festival, in 2002 at The Garage in Highbury. The original Ladyfest took place in Olympia, Washington in 2000 and inspired a continuing global movement. Nazmia also curated films at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (now BFI ...
Read more
Don Hibbs, born in 1944, is an Australian who has lived in London for longer than he has in Australia. From 1970 – 1976 he worked as Food and Beverage manager for Rowton House in King’s Cross. Now retired, he shares memories of King’s Cross in the early 1970s, the union meetings at his hotel ...
Read more
Séamus Rea was born in 1956, in Northern Ireland. He moved to the King’s Cross area in 1980, and has lived there ever since. Moving to King’s Cross represented an escape from the oppressive atmosphere that he had grown up in, as a young gay man. “It was an amazing, liberating experience to move to ...
Read more
Jarlath O’Connell vividly remembers one particular night that was held at The Bell: Jo Purvis’ Sunday Tea Dances. Here he opens the doors and takes us inside. A cocktail bar? In King’s Cross? I mean, there were crack-whores giving blowjobs for a fiver in the stairwells and the doorways. The idea that people would come ...
Read more
Amy Lamé (b. 1971), founder of legendary gay club Duckie, ended up as a resident of King’s Cross when she married a vicar, Jenny. The flat in Bloomsbury came with her wife’s job in the Anglican Church. Amy discovered it once housed orphaned girls from the Foundling Hospital, who were training as domestic servants. The ...
Read more
A podcast opening the door to the Bell, an iconic lesbian and gay pub of the 80s and 90s. Kings Cross. A run down part of London, haunted by addicts, homeless people, sex workers – and queers, drawn there by the music and energy of one pub. The Bell. Situated on Pentonville Road, this shabby ...
Read more
I meet Paul Allchin at the British Library to talk about a night out in King’s Cross with ex-partner George Duff. The conversation moves from the night out to the roles we play in the lives of those we are closest to. It feels like we are a million miles from the small room at ...
Read more
Christopher Watson was born on Christmas day in 1941. We met him in his house on Packenham Street, where he has lived for over 40 years. We discovered there a host of characters who have accompanied Christopher through the pubs, clubs and drag balls of King’s Cross and Soho from the 1960s to today. When Christopher ...
Read more
Chrissie Joyce and Denise Spence first met each other at The Bell, a pub and venue on Pentonville Road during the 1980s/90s. With a shared Northern Irish heritage the two women had left Ireland seeking to escape – in Denise’s words – a climate of ‘drink, violence, religion and hate’. Gravitating to the King’s Cross ...
Read more
Central Station is an unassuming pub, down a side street in King’s Cross. After work it welcomes the office-crowd, with its friendly atmosphere and free pool. After dark the blackout blinds come down, and the burlesque cabaret dancers step out. The basement houses a fetish club that Duncan Irvine – co-owner and manager – is ...
Read more
Jim MacSweeney moved from Ireland to London in 1982 to do a drama course, and found a world that felt 20 years ahead of the place he had left behind.By his own admission, he wonders whether he came for a drama course, or to deal with his sexuality. The move proved to be both a ...
Read more
Huw Arfon Williams was born in 1959, and came to London in 1983. We meet him to discuss gay London from the 80s onwards, in a stylish members’ club in Soho. It’s a fitting place to meet Huw, who is a stylish man, but when he declares that the sartorial choices he made in the ...
Read more
After graduating from Warwick University, Rob Pateman moved into a rundown flat in Finsbury Park and spent his 20’s exploring his sexuality on London’s gay scene. A key part of his education and centre of his social universe was The Bell, an iconic gay pub at Kings Cross. He worked on the door for several ...
Read more
Debbie Smith, Heritage Coordinator, Musician and DJ on her memories of King’s Cross and The Bell. I met Debbie one chilly October morning in her offices at the grand and glorious Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives at Bancroft Library. We talked about her past as a frequenter of The Bell (now The Big ...
Read more
I interviewed James Stewart Grant at his house in Stoke Newington in July 2017. James has one of those wonderful homes that you sometimes stumble across working on projects like this – full of original artworks, and lined with books. Over the course of the morning we spoke about his arrival in London from Edinburgh, ...
Read more
Jonathan Blake was born in 1949. That makes him 68 years old when we meet him to talk about his memories of King’s Cross and LGSM, in September 2017. He is officially a pensioner, he tells me proudly; he never expected to be able to say that, having been diagnosed with HTLV-3 – which later ...
Read more
On May Day 1980 a boy from Manchester and a boy from Plymouth arrived in London. They were Martin and Berni of Movements and had met in Plymouth a year earlier when Berni was a student and Martin was a local. They had been involved in local gay and anti-Nazi activism movements. They also shared ...
Read more