The Royal Vauxhall Tavern
1863–present
First venue listed for its LGBT significance
The Royal Vauxhall Tavern – the RVT – opened in 1863 on the site of the old Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. From the end of the Second World War, servicemen who had found each other in wartime began gathering here, and it became a gay pub. By the 1970s it was home to London’s most distinctive drag cabaret tradition: the kidney-shaped bar doubled as a stage, with shows several nights a week.
In 2014 the RVT was granted Grade II listed status – one of the first buildings in the country listed specifically for its LGBT cultural significance – and a spirited community campaign has fought to protect it from redevelopment ever since. Scenes for All of Us Strangers were filmed here in 2023. The Pleasure Gardens are gone; the RVT is still here.
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The Stage – Lily Savage, Duckie and the Diana Night
1970s–present
Where the legends played
This tiny stage carried some of the greatest names in British drag. Paul O’Grady’s Lily Savage held court here for years of weekly shows, and the RVT’s own resident cabaret has run from Hinge and Bracket to the Dame Edna Experience – the long-serving drag tribute act, a fixture of the venue’s Sunday shows. From November 1995 the RVT became home to Duckie, Amy Lamé’s Saturday-night club of live art and cabaret, with the London Readers Wifes on the decks, which ran here for over two decades. Diana Dors came; Freddie Mercury was a regular in the 1970s; and every August Bank Holiday the pub hosted the GMFA “Sports Day,” a raucous fundraiser for the HIV charity.
And then the night that became legend: sometime in the late 1980s, by Cleo Rocos’s account, Princess Diana slipped in disguised in a leather cap and aviator shades, alongside Freddie Mercury and Kenny Everett – passing for Freddie’s model boyfriend, staying about twenty minutes, and loving every second.
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