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Notable Landmarks · London, Greater London

The Gateways Club

Behind a green door at 239 King's Road, the Gateways became what English Heritage calls London's best-known and longest-lived lesbian social venue. It introduced a women-only policy in 1967, closed in September 1985, and received an English Heritage blue plaque on 2 July 2025.

StatusDocumented history
Datec.1931 – 1985
The peopleTed & Gina Ware, Maureen Duffy, patrons incl. Dusty Springfield, Maggi Hambling, Sandi Toksvig
The site239 King's Road, corner of Bramerton Street
Coordinates51.48480, -0.16880 (confidence 5/5)

The story

Behind a plain green door at 239 King's Road, Chelsea, a steep staircase led down to the Gateways — described by English Heritage as London's best-known and longest-lived lesbian social venue, and often called one of the longest-running lesbian clubs in the world. It opened around 1931 as a bohemian drinking den welcoming outsiders of every kind, and became increasingly a women's space during the war. Ted Ware took it over during the Second World War (legend says he won it in a bet); his wife Gina ran it from the late 1950s with the American "Smithy" at the bar. In 1967 it introduced a women-only policy.

The room itself was tiny: a smoky basement about thirty-five feet long, a jukebox playing songs about girls, a fruit machine, and a dance floor so cramped the crush was the point. It ran on strict rules — no entry after ten, no kissing except in the toilets — and on the butch-and-femme codes of the day, with newcomers expected to pick a side and dress it: suits and short hair, or dresses and heels. Jill Gardiner's oral history From the Closet to the Screen preserves some eighty members' voices.

In 1968 the club appeared in the film The Killing of Sister George, with real members paid £10 a day as extras — for many British women, the first lesbian world they had ever seen on screen. Gina regretted it. The club closed in September 1985, its late licence lost to noise complaints in an ever-pricier Chelsea; members took the nameplate as a souvenir, and English Heritage unveiled a plaque on 2 July 2025. And the enabling fact behind it all: sex between women was never criminalised in Britain — not, as myth claims, because Queen Victoria disbelieved in it (she had no power to strike a clause, and none existed to strike), but because male lawmakers chose deliberate silence.

More stories at this spot

Mick Jagger, turned away at the door

According to Gina's daughter, Mick Jagger would stop and chat with Gina as he passed on the King's Road, and repeatedly begged to be let inside the famous club. She refused every time. He offered, at one point, to wear a dress. "Darling, I can't," she told him — "it's women-only." One of the most famous men in the world could not buy his way through the green door.

The book that hid the club in plain sight

In 1966, the writer Maureen Duffy described "the famous Gateways Club" — the dull green door, the cellar steps, the girls gathering for the weekend — in her chapter on Lesbian London in a popular guide to the city, and fictionalised it as the "House of Shades" in her novel The Microcosm. Until then the club had been passed by word of mouth alone. Print made it findable, and slightly less safe.

A haven that welcomed more than one minority

The Gateways was never only a lesbian club. In Ted Ware's day it was a meeting place for the Chelsea Arts Club and a rare venue where black Londoners were welcome — the jazz pianist Chester Harriott played there — alongside gay men and anyone else the respectable world excluded. As one member put it, everyone mixed, because everyone was in a minority of one kind or another.

Sources

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Documented history

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