Central Station

Most places Near covers are measured in years. This one is measured in decades, and the decades are the reason to write about it.

In April 1974, Gay Switchboard ran a Saturday disco at a pub on Wharfdale Road called The Prince Albert. By January 1975 a group called Gay Alliance had taken over the discos, after the Gay Liberation Front collective gave the job up on what the record calls ideological grounds. In August 1975 the North London GLF was advertising gay discos there on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays in the pages of Gay News. In 1976 Icebreakers took the residency. In 1977 and 1978 the Alternative Gay Alliance ran Fridays.

That address became Central Station in 1992. The pub sign still carries the old name.

I dwell on this because it's the whole point. London lost 58% of its LGBTQ+ venues between 2006 and 2016 — the number that anchors Near's piece on Dalston Superstore. Set that against a room where queer people have been organising discos since Harold Wilson was prime minister, and you're not looking at a bar with good longevity. You're looking at continuous occupation.

The history has teeth, too. In August 1979 Icebreakers moved their Friday disco out to the Hemingford Arms after the landlord of the Prince Albert refused entry to two young people dressed punk. That's a very specific, very 1979 argument about who a gay venue is for, preserved in a Gay News listing, and it's a useful corrective to any temptation to write about a fifty-year-old queer pub as if it had been uncomplicatedly on the right side of everything the whole time. It hasn't. Almost nothing has.

What's actually there now

Three floors, and this is where a night porter's read matters more than a historian's.

Ground level is a working pub with a kitchen — pub classics and lighter plates, a bar, sport on, live entertainment, outdoor seating. Upstairs there are rooms. In the basement is the Underground Club, which runs men's cruise nights on a rotating schedule through the week.

That last fact is not a wink and it isn't buried here for a reason: if you are booking a bed, you should know what the building does at night. For a lot of Near's readers that's the appeal and the whole point of staying somewhere that isn't a chain. For others it's a hard no. Both are completely reasonable, and you cannot make that call from a booking-site photograph — which is exactly why an accommodation page should say it plainly rather than describing the room's "vibrant atmosphere."

Practically: this is a pub with rooms, not a hotel with a bar. Expect pub-with-rooms sound insulation on a Friday when the ground floor closes at 1am and the basement is going. Ask for something away from the stairwell. Come Monday to Thursday if you want to sleep, come Friday or Saturday if sleeping isn't the priority.

Who it's for

The King's Cross around it has been comprehensively redeveloped — this is now one of the most expensively rebuilt districts in London, and a three-floor independent queer pub with cheap-ish rooms is a conspicuous survival in it. That survival is the recommendation. If you want polish, the neighbourhood now has an enormous amount of it, none of which has been anyone's disco since 1974.

Go for the continuity, not the fittings. And if you're building a queer London itinerary rather than a single night, Dalston Superstore is the other end of the same argument — thirty years younger, up in E8, and making its case about the present rather than the past.