The Magic Garden
The Magic Garden on Battersea Park Road is a garden-style bar, performance space and nightlife venue known for its relaxed, colourful atmosphere and outdoor social space. In 2025 it became the site of a Pride Punx takeover during the Wandsworth Arts Fringe, when Tali Clarke’s Pride Punx collective programmed a series of queer-centred events — cabaret, gigs, storytelling shows, singing workshops and stand-up comedy — across six events in five days.
Pride Punx is a community arts organisation founded in 2016 to bring back the protest element of Pride through a DIY punk ethos. It began with a punk float at Pride in London that featured live music on a freight lorry, funded by crowdfunding and grassroots gigs and aimed at reclaiming the parade’s radical roots. Clarke and collaborators have described the collective as angry but joyful, committed to love, equality and freedom.
In later years, Pride Punx hosted fundraising shows in squats and community venues and supported grassroots groups working with LGBTQ+ people facing homelessness, including projects that raised money for crisis shelter provision. During the COVID period, the collective also created remote performance projects, keeping queer creative networks active when venues were closed.
The Pride Punx programme at Magic Garden brought queer performance, community and protest energy into an everyday social venue, showing how queer cultural life in Wandsworth can take over and transform ordinary nightlife spaces, making room for creative expression, activism and collective celebration beyond traditional LGBTQ+ clubs.
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