The Nine Elms Cold Store
Nine Elms · the cruising ground that crowned the night
When it opened in 1964, the Nine Elms Cold Store was billed as “Europe’s most modern cold store” – a vast riverside monolith holding two million cubic feet of meat, fish and butter. It fell silent in 1979, and for the next twenty years stood empty and derelict beside the Thames.
In that emptiness it found a second life. Gay men adopted the abandoned cold store as a night-time cruising ground – handy, as one local history put it, for rounding off a night out at the nearby Royal Vauxhall Tavern or the Market Tavern. It was the place to go if you hadn’t been lucky at either. The great derelict fridge stood until 1999, when it was finally demolished; luxury riverside flats now cover the site. Not every landmark of queer Vauxhall was a bar.