Queer Premises

Book excerpt: Queer premises provide vital social and cultural infrastructure – a queer infrastructure – connecting different generations and locations, facilitating the movement of resources, across and beyond the city. Queer Premises offers evidence for how London's diverse LGBTQ+ populations have embedded themselves into urban space, systems and resources. It sets out to understand how, across their different material dimensions, bars, cafés, nightclubs, pubs, community centres, and hybrids of these typologies, have been imagined, created and sustained. From the 1980s to the present, Campkin asks how, where, and why these venues have been established, how they operate and the purposes they serve, what challenges they face and why they close down.