Queer Premises: LGBTQ+ Venues in London Since the 1980s

Description

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, cafes, 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.

Ben Campkin is the author of Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in London, which in 2014 won the Urban Communication Foundation Jane Jacobs Award and was Commended in the Royal Institute for British Architects President's Awards for Research. Ben is Professor of History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK, and Co-Director of UCL's Urban Laboratory.

This terrific book deftly unpicks the shifting and unequal forces - from LGBTQ+ activism to clunky planning processes and neo-liberal urban redevelopment - that have affected the survival or closure of London's queer venues since the 1980s. Professor Campkin's fine-grained and authoritative analysis illuminates our understanding of London's queer nightlife and will reshape queer urban studies. * Alison Oram, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, UK * In these pages lives a network of places that scale up into structures of urban governance, planning, and "queer infrastructure" in London. The clever move to examine the heritage values of these LGBTQ+ venues enables Campkin to show the collectivist project of placemaking initiatives. An absolute tour de force. * Amin Ghaziani, Professor of Sociology, University of British Columbia *