The Salisbury
Gay pub, actors’ pub, and a scene from Victim
The Salisbury at 90 St Martin’s Lane has been an inn here since at least 1892 in its current form. Its interior is Victorian gin-palace architecture at its finest: mahogany screens, cut glass, a horseshoe bar, bronze figurines. It has been known at once as a gay pub, an actors’ pub and a theatre pub – categories that overlap heavily in this neighbourhood.
It appears in the 1961 film Victim, with Dirk Bogarde as a barrister blackmailed over a past gay relationship – one of the first British films to use the word “homosexual” and to present a gay character sympathetically. It appears again in Nighthawks (1978). The theatre crowd has made this one of the most consistent gay pubs in London for sixty years. Grade II listed. The bar hasn’t changed; the choice has. Walk in.