The next five years will be crucial to the long-term fate of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, the iconic south London LGBTQ pub, club and cabaret venue that is being sold to unidentified new owners.
By Ben Walters
“I’ve got five years to get RVT turned around and made into a viable business, but for that to happen we need support from the gay community,” says James Lindsay. Lindsay has been co-owner of the venue with Paul Oxley since 2005 and will now oversee its operation under a five-year arrangement with the new owners.
The Tavern – currently home to nights like Duckie, Charlie Hides TV and Bar Wotever – has housed LGBT performance for generations. But concerns about its future have been fuelled by the secrecy around the venue’s sale and its prime location in one of London’s most lucrative property-development hotspots.
Before our conversation, Lindsay’s only public statement about the sale had been posted to Facebook, on September 30th. It announced that “RVT will undergo a full refurbishment both internal and external, which will see the first floor being opened as a wine and champagne bar”. It made no explicit mention of the Tavern as an LGBT performance venue.
“I want to dispel the rumours that RVT will stop being gay,” Lindsay now says. “It’s a gay business. I am hurt by the comments people are making.” The first-floor bar will also be gay, he says. And performance will remain at the venue’s heart. “Cabaret is what’s made the RVT what it is.”
“What happens downstairs will continue,” Lindsay insists, referring to the main pub and performance space. “I want to make slight changes to the entertainment in the week. Friday, Saturday, Sunday will remain business as usual.”
Lindsay plans to renovate the building exterior and bar décor “by Christmas”, describing these as “minimal changes for taking the image of RVT forward. The whole of that bit will be brought back into good repair. I want to improve the facilities.”
Plans for the new firstfloor bar are dependent on securing planning permission, which would take longer.
Asked about the purchasers’ identity, Lindsay said only that “the new owners will make a statement in due course”.
Concern about the RVT’s future is bound up with appreciation of it past. The location has a unique history of carnivalesque fun, queer performance and, on occasion, resistance and defiance. This spirit dates back to the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens that stood on the site from the seventeenth century until 1859. The pub was built in 1863.
“I want to dispel the rumours that RVT will stop being gay.”
Drag performance has been a regular feature since the post-war years, if not earlier. The pub nurtured icons such as Adrella, Regina Fong and Lily Savage, who in 1988 was famously carted off in a police van after telling punters to riot during a raid at the height of the AIDS crisis.
Around the same time, Freddie Mercury and Kenny Everett took Princess Diana to the pub, dressed as a boy. RVT has also appeared in milestones of British gay cinema such as Pride and Beautiful Thing.
Today, the Tavern is perhaps London’s preeminent LGBT performance venue, putting on hundreds of shows a year, including regular runs by David Hoyle. It also serves as a hub of community engagement, including fundraising sports days.
The main challenge to the venue’s future, according to James Lindsay, is commercial. In his statement of September 30th, he said “RVT has made substantial losses in recent years”, prompting the sale. But Lindsay’s LinkedIn profile reports that the venue managed to “increase turnover to £1.4m over a 5 year period (+93%)”.
Those figures, he says, apply to the period before the departure of its most reliable earner, Jonathan Hellyer, whose long-running Sunday-afternoon residency as The DE Experience came to an end last year.
“Since Jonathan Hellyer stepped out 18 months ago, it has devastated our business,” Lindsay says. “Anybody who’s a regular visitor will see our Sundays haven’t been supported as they should have been. If the gay community want the RVT to survive they have to support it.”
Midweek attendance is particularly variable. The Tavern does not currently open during the day or offer a dining menu or official outside space. “It’s all up for review,” Lindsay says of the venue’s operation. “As a business operator, I think we’re doing ourselves a disservice” by missing certain opportunities.
On his LinkedIn profile, Lindsay also mentions plans for “a corporate hospitality programme of events targeting business to business and business to consumer markets”. Earlier this month, an edition of experimental performance night UnderConstruction was cut at short notice in favour of a commercial booking.
In a second statement on Facebook on October 10th, Lindsay affirmed that venue employees’ jobs were safe and pledged “to provide regular updates through the RVT Facebook page” on the Tavern’s development.
News of the pub’s sale prompted the formation of a Facebook page, Future of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, which attracted more than 1,000 followers within two days. The page was set up by several people, including blogger Steve Akehurst and civil servant Richard Heaton.
“I’ve been going for 15 years,” Heaton says. “I love the spirit and community of the place. It’s a safe, experimental space that should be of interest to anyone who cares about the history of London, pop culture, the avant garde… If the RVT were to stop being an LGBT performance space, queer London would lose part of its soul.”
A statement on the Future of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern Facebook page insists its intention is not “to question James [Lindsay]’s good intentions, or his personal commitment to the RVT” or to deny “that the RVT at present is not profitable”. The group, Heaton says, is simply seeking clarity.
“It’s like a football club. The fans want a say. And until we know who the new owners are, we’re cautious. Of course, it’s an owner’s prerogative to do deals without transparency but this is a venue with such history. The fact it’s excited such passion goes to show how special a place it is.”
Heaton and 40 other local patrons have successfully applied to Lambeth Council to add RVT to its list of assets of community value. This means that only limited changes can be made to how the property is used and, in the event of a future sale, those with an interest in its community role would have an opportunity to make an offer at market rates.
Lindsay says profit has never been his main motivation. “When the property was sold, I could have walked away,” he says. “I didn’t do that.” In his statement of September 30th, he reported that he and Oxley received “two very strong offers… One would have seen RVT closed for immediate development. I forcibly resisted that offer, instead working with the new owners, who I believe understand, respect the history and culture of RVT.”
“It’s difficult to run a commercial cabaret theatre seven nights a week,” acknowledge Simon Casson, of Duckie. Having branched out to the Southbank Centre, Barbican, New York, Tokyo and, last month, Sitges, Duckie still considers the Tavern home.
“The future is potentially very bright,” says Casson. Duckie began life at the RVT in 1996 and still considers it home. “If James wants to spend a few bob on the venue, make it a nice destination, I’d be in favour of that… Have an outdoor area, open in the daytime, do food, open upstairs – nice wines, why not? – and have great shows on at night. I’d be against long-term plans like knocking it down and building flats or a hotel.”
And what if that appeared to be on the cards? “Do the council really want a hundred-odd drag queens outside the town hall with placards?”
“I will do my utmost to save the RVT,” Lindsay insists. By his own account, he has five years to do that, with the help of its patrons. What happens after that in the absence of commercial success is, for now, anyone’s guess.
But until the new owners, whoever they are, make clear their understanding and respect for the history and culture of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, and express unambiguous long-term support for it as an LGBT performance venue, anxiety about the future of this London icon will persist.
• This is an edited version of an article first posted on Ben Walters’s blog, nottelevision.net.
• Tim Brunsden’s half-hour film Happy Birthday RVT (made as part of Duckie’s Lottery-funded project of the same name about the venue’s history) screens for free at the RVT at 8.30pm on Saturday October 18, before Duckie’s regular Saturday night event.
