'I always felt comfortable as a woman there, when sometimes in gay male spaces you don't.'Ī lot of LGBT spaces have closed in London over the last ten years – 58 percent of existing gay venues closed between 20 – and, as with many of these, The Joiners succumbed to the forces of gentrification, doomed to close when landlord David Pollard was informed that his lease would not be renewed.
'You'd talk to different people in the smoking area – it was friendly,' she remembers of the poky outdoors space. A lesbian who moved to London from the valleys in South Wales, she describes the strange paradox of The Joiners: a place that was thrilling and exciting, but also a second home. It wasn't clinical in any way, and you didn't know what you were going to get when you walked in,' says Amy Roberts, one of the people who set up those first meetings. 'It's hard to put into words what it was about the place.
