Granada, Tooting

The rollcall includes international stars and major pop acts, with performers remembered here ranging from Frank Sinatra to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Artists such as Dusty Springfield — later open about her relationships with both women and men — also appeared here in the early 1960s, alongside a constant programme of variety and family entertainment.
The Granada’s programmes and publicity also intersect strongly with queer cultural history. Materials linked to the venue feature stars such as Ramon Novarro, a gay Hollywood actor whose career depended on careful public image management, and Tallulah Bankhead, famous for her swaggering persona and long-rumoured relationships with women, including her intense fascination with Greta Garbo. Even where performers could not be openly out at the time, their presence shows how queer-coded celebrity circulated through mainstream local entertainment.
The venue is also closely tied to the musical world that shaped later queer icons. Marc Bolan, who would go on to become the glam-rock star behind T. Rex and a major figure in gender-nonconforming pop performance, grew up in Tooting and came of age musically during the years when the Granada was hosting major rock and pop acts. While not known primarily as a queer venue, the Granada formed part of the cultural landscape that fed into later forms of flamboyant, androgynous and camp popular music that became central to queer cultural expression in the 1970s.
The Granada also hosted performers who became lasting queer icons in their own right. Carmen Miranda is widely recognised as a gay icon, celebrated for her flamboyant costumes and camp performance style, and the venue’s concert history includes Little Richard — a Black queer pioneer whose sound and stage presence challenged ideas about gender, sexuality and respectability in popular music.
Alongside headline acts, the Granada’s pantomimes and variety shows also mattered: formats where disguise, exaggeration and gender play were part of popular family entertainment long before anyone used the language of “queer.”
The Granada’s queer significance lies not in being an LGBTQ+ venue, but in how it brought queer stars, queer-coded performance and gender play into the heart of everyday life in Wandsworth, shaping what local audiences saw, admired and remembered.