The Philbeach Hotel
The only gay hotel run by gay men in London
The Philbeach Hotel, in the grand Victorian terrace of Philbeach Gardens, was for 27 years “the only gay hotel in London that was owned by homosexuals and run by homosexuals.” With 35 rooms across three floors, it was one of the largest gay hotels in Europe. Attached to it was Wilde About Oscar, a restaurant named for the neighbourhood’s most famous literary exile.
Oscar Wilde had been forced to leave London for Paris; his name on a restaurant menu, in a street once stamped with shame, was in its way a small reclamation. The hotel closed on 31 January 2008. Wilde was sentenced to hard labour in 1895; by the 1980s there was a restaurant named for him in the very neighbourhood that had once turned its face away.