In the second of our pieces exploring queer approaches to architectural history and heritage, Matthew Whitfield explores queer architectural history and its relationship with the heritage designation system.

The Royal Vauxhall Tavern (1860–62), Kennington Lane, London

I defy you to do your worst. It can hardly be my worst. Mine has already and often happened to me. You cannot touch me now. I am one of the ‘stately homos of England’.
Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, 1975.

Can we list homosexuality at Grade I, or at least give it a blue plaque? The UK is unfortunately not a signatory of UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage so we are left instead with the question of the very tangible queer heritage we can see, how we understand it and how – or if – we protect it. What even is it? Can architecture or a landscape be gay, and how can we think of it as heritage? The simple fact of age usually does much of the heavy lifting when thinking about how we apprehend heritage, but significance is defined by much more than miles on the clock. Connoisseurship continues to play its part of course, and the way in which a formal system of heritage protection has evolved in this country has always included fairly broad definitions of historical significance in addition to design quality, rarity or big-name attribution. Much of the work already undertaken to better understand architectural history though a queer lens has been carried out by activists, artists and academics over the last 50 years, and especially over the last ten. But this still feels like the beginning of the story.

Historic England has formal responsibility for the protection of historic sites: buildings, archaeology, maritime wrecks and open spaces such as battlefields and gardens. In recent years, the organisation has moved towards a greater interest in sites of LGBTQ+ significance and how these can be better understood, both by means of the formal statutory systems of protection and in a wider sense. We’re over 70 years into the current legal regime of formal protection for buildings: Section 28 of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act specified that buildings of ‘special architectural and historic significance’ be compiled into a list and be recognised as such. Just over 40 years later, another Section 28 in the 1988 Local Government Act proscribed the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools, until repealed in 2003, and is indicative of how ‘historical significance’ has always been patrolled and delineated by norms of acceptability.

Largely, it is architectural rather than historical significance that has led the way in successive interpretations of the 1947 Act, though England’s queer past has entered the realm of heritage numerous times throughout the last 70 years, often by default or by accident. In 1959, the modest forester’s cottage of Clouds Hill in Dorset was listed because T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) – widely understood to have had relationships with men – had restored it as a personal retreat and literary salon in the 1920s. This queer aspect of the building’s history is not present in the official record, but it is common for list entries to be amended in the light of new research and understanding. In recent years the ‘Enriching the List’ initiative has also allowed members of the public to submit their own text and images underneath official list text, so that a listed asset, though a fixed point in law, becomes far more adaptable in terms of the meanings and values ascribed to it.

Out of a small field, the highest profile building listed because of an explicit connection to LGBTQ+ history is the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, London, listed at Grade II in 2015. It has hosted drag revues and catered to queer clientele since at least the early 1950s, and has strong historical associations with the former use of the site as Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens and the revels that took place there up until the 1850s – the pub was built in 1860–62 as part of a speculative residential development. The ‘RVT’ is thus a handsome building with a richly layered past, but the list entry makes clear that the architectural case for the building is at least as strong as the historical case, with an implicit sense that one argument without the other would not have created a sufficiently strong case for formal protection, but that both together create a convincing conclusion.

Listed-building status can also work in concert with a number of other locally derived layers of protection: Asset of Community Value (ACV) status offers communities and voluntary associations first refusal on buying a site if it is on the market, for example. With listed-building status at the top, designations below this level can be used to recognise and defend queer heritage, so that material consideration can be given to them in the planning process. In the case of the RVT, though, it is clear that the formal protection of listing has given the venue a fighting chance of creating new queer history, not just an understanding of the LGBTQ+ presence in England’s past.

The reality is that the majority of sites of LGBTQ+ historical significance will not meet the requirements of the listing process. Possibly the most threatened building types in this category are the queer pubs and nightclubs that are frequently falling victim to cut-throat property speculation. Even those housed in historic buildings like The Yard in Soho (a 19th-century carriage-house and stables) are not straightforward to save if they cannot meet the threshold of distinctiveness or rarity in architectural terms. What can help, and did in the case of The Yard – aided by political will and a committed activist base – is research that demonstrates how non-designated buildings can still make a contribution, especially in a Conservation Area. This contribution can include functional history as much as architectural interest, though as far as the formal planning process goes it is clearly more difficult to make a case if historical record and cultural meaning lacks the ballast of architectural quality.

The Cabin, Buck Mills, Bideford, North Devon.

Queer architecture can and should be protected materially, but more can be done to aid our understanding of it. The ‘Pride of Place’ project ran from 2014–16 as a Historic England in-house initiative to work with queer history in the broadest possible sense. Working with academics and community groups, the goal was to create many new ways to understand LGBTQ+ heritage by interrogating existing histories as well as uncovering new ones from the grassroots up. A permanent online exhibition was created with fresh interpretations of extraordinary lives led in often very ordinary places, in addition to a crowdsourced map that includes layers of tangible and intangible heritage and memories: personal, political and institutional. The project even yielded some re-listing, upgraded listings and a small number of new listings, such as The Cabin on the beach slipway at Bucks Mills, North Devon, a former 19th-century fisherman’s store shared as a summerhouse and studio by the artists Judith Ackland and Mary Stella Edwards from the 1920s right through to Ackland’s death 1971. Searching for queer stories in our built environment takes us on a journey through palaces and cathedrals, certainly, but understanding the vernacular – the basement bar off the main street, the unassuming fisherman’s hut – yields some of the best treasure. We just need to know how to look, and to care in the first place.

Matthew Whitfield is an architectural investigator for Historic England.

For more information on the SAHGB LGBTQIA+ network, or to get involved, please contact ewan.harrison@sahgb.org.uk.

The Stately Homos of England

Virtually Italian

Queering the National Trust