The Return Of The Joiners Arms

The beloved East London venue is back with a vengeance!


The Joiners Arms was a much-loved Hackney Road homo haunt that had to shut its doors in early 2015 after Regal Homes, a property developer, bought the site. Since then, a community group made up of former punters, Friends Of The Joiners Arms, have been campaigning to try and get the bar re-opened as it was. There were some positive developments in August, when Tower Hamlets Council stipulated to Regal that an LGBT+ space should form part of any new development, but this was with stringent opening hours, no smoking areas, or any investment in noise control. It was pretty clear that this was to be a shoddy imitation of the old Joiners.

However, last week, much more favourable conditions were imposed by councillors, which committed developers to granting a 25-year lease for an LGBT+ venue with the late opening hours that the Joiners enjoyed, plus £130,000 towards fit-out costs of the venue, a 12-month rent-free period, and commitments to enhancing the sound-proofing of the venue. After three years of fighting, the hard work of FOTJA has brought about the first ever planning decision of its kind.

We spoke to Peter and Dan from FOTJA to celebrate and see what the future holds.


So after years of campaigning, it looks like the Joiners may be returning! Why did Tower Hamlets Council change their mind?

The council have always – up to a point – been understanding about our campaign to save the Joiners. Like a lot of London boroughs, Tower Hamlets has a lot of different faces; it’s home to some very wealthy people, a lot of ‘cutting edge culture’, the young and the beautiful, but it’s also one of the poorest boroughs in the country with a housing crisis and a decade of austerity! So it’s understandable that the council don’t want to stand in the way of developers who are proposing what seem like solutions, but we have had to work hard to emphasise why the loss of the Joiners was such a red line. A lot of councilors have been super supportive, but the council are trying to balance a lot of competing demands. Maybe they ultimately agreed with us because they saw we weren’t going to stop shouting, and we’re not going to go away!

This wouldn’t have happened without the efforts of FOTJA. How are you going to stay involved in the new venue?

Thanks! The next steps are to finish forming a community benefit society – which is a type of not-for-profit, social enterprise (the RVT campaign are also doing this) and then raise funds to bid for the lease. But to do this – and to meet our aim of being as diverse and representative of the community as we can – we need to build out the organisation. Anyone who has any interest in the future of queer nightlife, a queer community centre, or just queer life in general will be invited to join the group and lead the next stage of planning, to take a direct role in designing what the space will look like, how it will function, and who it will serve. Ultimately we understand that other queer operators might bid for the lease too – and it’s hugely important that, even if FOTJA don’t run it, there will be a sustainable, late night queer venue back on Hackney Road that we can return to.

Is it too early to be asking when you think doors will be re-opening?

Even at our most optimistic, we don’t think we’ll be having a pint there till 2020… sorry!

What have you been doing on the campaigning front to get to this stage?

We’ve held about a million meetings, written about 400gb worth of emails, Facebook messages, blog posts and the like, spent months on the phone, stood outside the Joiners in the sunshine and the pissing rain, spoken on panels, TV shows and breakfast radio, and printed flyers, posters and some beautiful T-shirts (which will be on sale soon). We had volunteers with specialist skills and knowledge around planning law and the like contribute to our mammoth objection letters. We’ve campaigned alongside We Are The Black Cap and RVT Futures, Lesbians & Gays Support the Migrants, Queer Space East, taken part in Queer Tours of London and the Bang Bus, and been part of Queer Spaces Network. But it’s not all glamour: we’ve also had fundraising parties with amazing DJs like Joiners-originals Dave Macho City or Cathal O’Brien and newer, but no less fierce, friends like Resis’dance and Kandou. The most important thing throughout has been getting as many people involved in the campaign and constantly demonstrating: we’re here, we’re queer, and we want another beer!

Why do you think queer venues are still so crucial in 2017?

Queer venues are life: it’s that simple. They serve different needs at different stages of your life – for those discovering or questioning who they are and what they like, they are a place to experiment, vocalise, play around, observe, interact. You can meet the love of your life, your best mate (for that night or the rest of your days), your playground rival, or someone who tells you a story you’ve never heard before. They can also – hopefully – be places welcoming to those who aren’t in a hedonistic tailspin, and act as a local or community centre for people who don’t have a space or a home in which they are comfortable. Ultimately they should provide a place to be yourself. There’s a lot of talk about how we have Grindr and gay marriage now; why do we need queer spaces? Well once you’ve chatted someone up on Grindr, where do you want to go on a date – Wetherspoons? And can you imagine a better place to have your queer honeymoon than the Joiners?! Until we are all free to be who we are, everywhere, we need queer spaces.

Do you think queer venues and luxury flats can happily co-exist in London?

Luxury flats wouldn’t exist in east London without places like the Joiners helping to turn those areas into ‘desirable’ and ‘trendy’ hotspots. So really the question is, can luxury flats exist without queer venues? More seriously, London is in the grip of an extreme housing crisis. Luxury flats are the last thing any of us need – unless they are to be filled by the Grenfell survivors who are still without permanent homes, or the LGBTQI youth who make up 25% of the capital’s homeless youths, or the elderly members of the LGBTQI communities who lost a generation in the AIDS/HIV crisis and don’t have family networks or state resources to support them. I mean, maybe there are rich white gay men who might feel like they need more luxury apartments, but I think the rest of our community have bigger fish to fry, and the Joiners campaign has always been more about creating spaces for those more marginalised and insecure in our community. We need sustainable housing for all communities, and we need places – like the Joiners – for us all to hang out and learn from one another.

What advice would you give to people organising similar grassroots campaigns?

Someone from the Ivy House – the first community run pub in London – told us at the start, this is going to take a long time. A looooong time. And she was right. So patience, good humour, and as wide a group as you can recruit to your cause. And lots of Babybel and Hummus. There are loads of grassroots campaigns out there who will support you, give you advice, and help you with shortcuts when they’ve been found. If you believe in something, get started immediately and please don’t give up. We need you.

What was your fondest memory of the old Joiners?

My residing memory relates to times I totally went for it on the dance floor and ended with a well-cleared circle in which I minced around picking people out to dance with and unceremoniously tossing them back into the mass of people laughing at or with me (it was never clear). A few weeks after a good series of these dance sessions I remember standing in the smoking area on an uncharacteristically sober weeknight, and this couple I’d never met before pointed excitedly at me saying “look it’s dancing man!” The first but not the last time my theatrical dancing gained me a degree of infamy. The Joiners was the first place to really bring that kind of thing out of me and I loved feeling part of a loose-knit community of semi-familiar faces meshed together with seasoned regulars and total newbies.

To find out more or get involved, go to FOTJA’s Facebook page – www.facebook.com/friendsofthejoinersarms

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