Queer Heritage · London, Greater London
The Caravan Club, 81 Endell Street
'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.
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The pub that named a district: Fitzrovia's all-comers salon where Dylan Thomas drank, Nina Hamnett — 'Queen of Bohemia' — held court on the subject of her lovers, and Quentin Crisp arrived nightly in full defiant maquillage. Louche, literary and gloriously unrespectable.
Documented historyHot spotBohemian & Libertine46 Gordon Square (Bloomsbury HQ)London, Greater London · EnglandThe drawing room where, one evening in 1907, Lytton Strachey pointed at a stain on Vanessa's dress and said a single unprintable word — and, as Woolf recorded, 'all barriers of reticence and reserve went down'. British conversation about sex was never quite the same; pair with Charleston for where the theory went to live.
Documented historyHot spotNotable LandmarksShaftesbury Memorial Fountain ('Eros')London, Greater London · EnglandLondon's classic lovers' meeting point — 'meet me under Eros' — though the statue is actually Anteros, the god of mature, requited love, chosen to commemorate the philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury (Gilbert called Eros/Cupid 'the frivolous tyrant').
Documented historyHot spotSpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.