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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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