Battersea Park: Pride and Visibility
In 2024 and 2025, Battersea Park hosted Wandsworth Family Pride, marking a significant moment in the park’s queer history. These family-friendly events brought performances, stalls and community activities into one of the borough’s most prominent public spaces, placing LGBTQ+ life openly and confidently at the centre of the park and welcoming people of all ages.
The programme reflected the breadth of contemporary queer culture in the borough, with drag, choirs, dance and live music alongside children’s activities and community stalls. Performers included groups such as London Gay Big Band, Trans Voices, and Bollywood-inspired dance collective BollyQueer, alongside drag artists including Moira Less and The Bitten Peach, plus DJ sets and fundraising walks. Events like this show Pride not only as protest or nightlife, but as everyday civic celebration rooted in local communities.
Set against earlier histories of coded language, secrecy and policing explored elsewhere on this map, these moments of visibility represent a striking shift. Where the park once offered concealment and risk, it now also accommodates celebration, creativity and intergenerational community.
Together, these layers show how the meanings of public space can change over time — and how Battersea Park continues to play a central role in the borough’s LGBTQ+ story, not only as a site of memory, but as an active setting for contemporary queer life.
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