The Market Tavern

Originally established to serve traders from the newly opened New Covent Garden Market, by evenings and weekends it became a vital social hub for queer people, drawing customers from across south London and far beyond. Its late licence, linked to market trading hours, meant that many arrived after other venues — including in Soho — had already closed, making it a familiar final stop at the end of long nights out.
Often described as sleazy, the Tavern wore this label with pride. It hosted leather nights and cultivated a permissive, unpretentious atmosphere that many remember fondly — including, as some recall, being able to smoke a spliff inside. The interior was dark and industrial, with alcoves and a smoking room, as well as a balcony reached by steep steps, all contributing to a sense of intimacy and informality. For many men it was also a cruisy space, closely connected to nearby industrial sites such as the Nine Elms cold store, which formed part of a wider network of informal places where men met for sex along the riverside and railway lines.
From the mid-1980s, the Market Tavern became especially significant for community-led club nights, many of them organised by lesbians and queer women working collectively. These were usually held mid-week, while weekends were dominated by men — a pattern that many women recall as imposed rather than chosen, reflecting how access to space and visibility was unevenly distributed even within queer communities. Entry on these nights was often controlled by volunteers from the scene itself, who staffed the door to keep the space queer and safe at a time when outside security could not be trusted to respond to homophobic or misogynistic threats.
Chain Reaction, founded and run by the radical, sex-positive collective later known as the Rebel Dykes, is remembered as one of the first lesbian S&M club nights, while Bulk was billed as “for big boys and girls and their admirers”, reflecting a more inclusive approach to bodies, gender and desire at a time when many spaces were highly exclusionary. On Bulk nights, small gestures — such as bowls of Quality Street chocolates placed on the bar — became part of the pub’s remembered character.
Music played a central role in shaping the Tavern’s atmosphere. Northern Soul was especially important on certain nights, with lesbian DJs playing live vinyl and shifting tracks quickly if the dancefloor dropped — creating an atmosphere that was responsive, communal and improvised rather than tightly programmed. Other nights focused on disco, pop and dance music.
The pub also hosted club and cabaret nights such as Wig’n’Casino, a Northern Soul-inflected party hosted by Amy Lamé, and Viva Apathy, featuring performers like The Divine David (David Hoyle), whose confrontational, surreal cabaret startled and delighted crowds. These events linked the Tavern to wider currents of experimental queer performance emerging across London. Sundays in particular are remembered fondly, when people might move between the RVT’s famous “Sunday Service” and the Market Tavern, which was known for serving a buffet lunch, creating an informal network of queer social life across borough borders.
Freddie Mercury is said to have been a regular at the leather nights, and to have owned a Market Tavern-branded vest. Performers such as drag star Adrella were also part of the wider scene that this circuit both drew on and helped sustain, reflecting how celebrity, subculture and everyday queer life often overlapped in these spaces.
From the late 1980s and into the 1990s, this same closeness was also marked by fear and loss, as HIV and AIDS tore through social networks and familiar faces began to disappear from the bar without explanation. Many remember this period as one of intense solidarity, shaped by the overlapping pressures of AIDS, Section 28 and economic precarity, when queer people relied heavily on each other for safety, friendship and survival. The Market Tavern was a place of sex, friendship and escape, but also of mourning and quiet mutual support, shaped by the realities of the epidemic as much as by pleasure and desire.
In more recent years, the Market Tavern has featured in research on queer histories connected to London’s transport and infrastructure, where it is remembered as a key meeting place alongside working lives spent largely underground. Although Market Towers was demolished during the Nine Elms redevelopment, the Market Tavern remains a powerful touchstone of south London queer memory — a place where music, sex, creativity and chosen family overlapped in a space that was messy, permissive and deeply loved.