Its closure in 2015 sparked a backlash and The Black Foundation was established. In one of the show’s evening talks, assistant curator Cameron Foote elaborates on the story of The Black Cap, Camden’s foremost LGBTQ+ pub known for its drag drag-cabaret since the 1960s.
![black gay bars london black gay bars london](https://i2-prod.mylondon.news/incoming/article15921049.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/46091092_2122162054764917_1592253636300242944_o.jpg)
Rent hikes demolitions to make way for luxury flats or in the case of Soho’s First Out cafe - one of the few daytime hangouts for the LGBTQ+ crowd - demolitions for HS2. The city is supposed to be home to one of the queer citadels of the world, and yet the exhibition - hosted in the Whitechapel’s diminutive Gallery 4 - is a comprehensively researched record of community fightbacks against closures in a rapidly gentrifying city overwhelmed by market-led change, beginning with Thatcher and now on neoliberal speed. In the decade to 2017, London has lost more than 70 of its LGBTQ+ venues. In a familiar tale, The Glass Bar was shut in 2008 when the landlord tripled the rent and backdated the increase.
![black gay bars london black gay bars london](https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-1500w,f_auto,q_auto:best/newscms/2017_43/2200666/eagle_nyc_1.jpg)
The Glass Bar is one of ten case studies in the Whitechapel’s current exhibition, Queer Spaces: London, 1980s – Today, which explores the transition of the capital’s queer scene over the past three decades. Now known unimaginatively as the Euston Tap, announced with a neon sign and a jacketless after-work crowd spilling on to the pavement, I had no idea that the Euston Tap had once been The Glass Bar, one of London’s few female-only spaces.
I once had a date in a bar housed across two Grade II-listed gatehouses at the entrance to Euston station. Until 25 August at Whitechapel Gallery, London Hannah Jane Parkinson explores Whitechapel Gallery’s Queer Spaces exhibition highlighting the decline of LGBTQ+ venues around London over the last three decades