Queer Heritage

Home of diarist Anne Lister, the 'first modern lesbian', who lived openly with Ann Walker; the pair considered themselves married after taking communion together in York in 1834. Lister's coded diaries are a UNESCO Memory of the World record.

Where Anne Lister and Ann Walker took the sacrament together to seal their union — commemorated by a blue plaque as the site of Britain's first lesbian marriage.

Oscar Wilde was arrested in Room 118 on 6 April 1895, an event immortalised in Betjeman's poem 'The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel'. Royal mistress Lillie Langtry also lived on the site — a double dose of scandal.

Wilde's family home during his years of fame and his affair with Bosie — a ten-minute walk from the hotel where it all came crashing down.

London's most famous molly house, a coffee-house refuge for gay men run by Margaret Clap. Constable Samuel Stevens' report of his 14 Nov 1725 visit records 'between 40 and 50 Men making Love to one another, as they call'd it'; the raid of 17 Feb 1726 saw ~40 arrested and three men — Gabriel Lawrence, Thomas Wright and William Griffin — hanged at Tyburn on 9 May 1726.

Home of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson's famously open marriage; Vita's affair with Virginia Woolf inspired 'Orlando', 'the longest love letter in literature'. Pair with Knole (her lost birthplace).

Vita's beloved birthplace, which she could not inherit as a woman — the emotional wound that Woolf transfigured into 'Orlando' and that fuelled their love affair.

Two upper-class Irish women who eloped in 1778 to set up home together, scandalising and enthralling Georgian society; their Gothic cottage drew Wordsworth, Byron, Wellington and Walter Scott, and Queen Charlotte won them a royal pension. A cornerstone of British queer heritage — Anne Lister herself visited.

Wilde — later the most famous martyr of Victorian anti-gay law — was schooled at Portora, giving Northern Ireland a real claim on his story; his name was struck from the honours board after his 1895 conviction, then restored, a poignant marker of posthumous rehabilitation.

'London's greatest bohemian rendezvous' said the flyers; 'a sink of iniquity' said the prosecution. The basement queer club survived six weeks of 1934 before the raid — but the police files preserved its dancing, its slang and its defiant joy in extraordinary detail, and in 2017 the National Trust reopened the basement as a memorial to it.

The market-garden home where the socialist philosopher Edward Carpenter lived openly with George Merrill decades before decriminalisation — sandal-making, vegetarianism and 'the intermediate sex' in the Derbyshire hills. A touch on the backside from Merrill, E.M

Where Wilde perfected the pose — blue china, sunflowers, a double first — that became the aesthetic movement. Oxford also formed the circles through which, years later, Bosie entered his life