Lyons Corner House – “The Lilypond”
The safest rendezvous in London
Before gay bars, there were tea rooms. J. Lyons’ Corner Houses were respectable, affordable, brilliantly lit – places where a city’s worth of clerks and civil servants could meet without suspicion. The Coventry Street branch became something more: from the 1930s, gay men found each other on the first-floor restaurant. Staff called it “the Lily Pond,” and the waitresses – who knew exactly what the corner was for – quietly kept straight customers seated elsewhere.
As police clamped down on men meeting in cafés, this corner became the safest rendezvous in London: too busy, too respectable and too well-lit to raid. The Corner House closed in 1970; the building is now a Vue cinema. The patch of floor where those men sat has held more secrets than any theatre.