The Cricketers Arms
The Cricketers Arms was an important queer pub in Battersea from the late 1970s through to the 1990s, known especially for drag, cabaret and mixed queer nights. It offered a south London alternative to Soho, embedding queer performance firmly within the setting of a local neighbourhood pub rather than a purpose-built club.
The venue is closely associated with The Trollettes, one of the most famous British drag acts of the twentieth century. The duo were Maisie Trollette (born David Raven) and Jimmy Trollette (born Jimmy Court), both seasoned entertainers long before drag entered the mainstream. Their act drew on music-hall traditions, sharp crowd-work and unapologetically working-class humour. Maisie, in particular, became known for performing well into later life, often drinking onstage and mercilessly heckling the audience, embodying a style of drag that was confrontational, affectionate and rooted in live community exchange rather than polished spectacle. When Maisie died in Brighton in 2023, tributes appeared in both local and national LGBTQ+ media, reflecting the depth of affection and respect she commanded across generations of audiences.
The Cricketers was significant enough in their story that The Trollettes recorded a live album here, capturing the sound and atmosphere of a Battersea drag night on vinyl — a rare surviving record of queer performance outside central London’s better-documented venues.
In the 1990s, the pub also hosted regular lesbian nights, making it one of the few consistent spaces for queer women in the area at the time. Performers included Polly Perkins, a well-known lesbian cabaret figure associated with the Soho scene, recognisable for her cigar-smoking stage persona and for performing her defiantly comic anthem Superdyke, which became a cult favourite. Her appearances at the Cricketers reflect how the venue supported not just drag, but a broader, overlapping queer cabaret culture.
Today, the Cricketers’ queer history is remembered largely through personal recollection and community networks rather than formal heritage markers. Many of the stories about the venue have resurfaced through local memory and community consultation, underlining how much of south London’s LGBTQ+ nightlife history survives not in official archives, but in the experiences and testimonies of the people who were there.
Together, these histories place the Cricketers Arms as a vital — if now largely overlooked — site of south London queer nightlife, where drag legends, lesbian performers and local audiences met in a space that was proudly unglamorous, rooted in neighbourhood life, and central to the cultural fabric of Battersea’s LGBTQ+ communities.
