Brompton Cemetery – Pride Picnics and Cruising Grounds
A quieter, older kind of meeting place
Brompton Cemetery – one of the Magnificent Seven Victorian garden cemeteries – was used for Pride picnics in the 1970s and 80s and remains one of London’s best-known cruising grounds. It holds 35,000 monuments across 39 acres of Gothic grandeur: colonnaded catacombs, crumbling stone angels, overgrown paths. The suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst is among its residents.
The community has long known the cemetery as a place of discreet encounter; historically the all-male spaces around cemeteries, parks and commons were the default meeting places before bars or clubs existed. Long before there were clubs, there were places where a man could walk and, if the light was right and another man walked the same path, something might happen that had no name but happened anyway. A quieter, contemplative stop before the tour’s finale.