Queer Spheres: Making and Un-making Worlds and Nations through London’s LGBTQ+ Night Spaces

Written by: Ben Campkin, Professor of Urbanism and Urban History, The Bartlett School of Architecture

Queer heritage is an area of contestation in the planning of night-time space. The chapter – Queer Spheres: Making and Un-making Worlds and Nations through London’s LGBTQ+ Night Spaces – focuses on London and looks at how dedicated LGBTQ+ night-time venues and mobile, pop-up events have been framed through optics of nationality and migration.

In the late 2010s, in response to closures and threats in redevelopment contexts, campaigners used local and national planning and heritage tools in attempts to safeguard or re-provide LGBTQ+ venues. Concurrently, more mobile and transient queer nightlife events proliferated, and these have had vital functions in sustaining LGBTQ+ populations. Many have been presented through migrant positionalities and performative responses to national identities, helping us to understand how and why LGBTQ+ populations create, hold, lose, or relinquish night-space within global city dynamics.

This chapter is published in Urban Nightlife and Contested Spaces: Cultural Encounters After Dusk (Amsterdam University Press, 2025), edited by Sara Brandellero, Kamilia Rodrigues and Derek Pardue.

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About the publication

Urban Nightlife and Contested Spaces: Cultural Encounters after Dusk captures the multifarious nature of the urban night and how it is lived, structured, and reflected upon in diverse cultural and artistic expressions. The volume acknowledges the urban night as an often-overlooked key dimension necessary to understand the complexities of today’s urban spaces, including the often-polarising question of migration. After dusk, urban social challenges are often magnified, as questions of who can be where and when – along ethnic, racial or gender lines, for example – gain an additional dimension.

The volume underscores, indeed, the multi-dimensionality of night spaces, where bottom-up, grassroot initiatives provide opportunities for self-expression by traditionally marginalized and silenced groups. Chapters span disciplines of urbanism and urban history, literary, film and cultural studies, music, sociology of labour, anthropology of migration, alongside autoethnographic contributions and practice-based photo essays by artists for whom the night is their habitual setting and canvas.

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