Gray Marchiori-Simpson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
La Camionera
A lesbian bar built like a Madrid café, on Well Street in Hackney — not Dalston.
Published
Reasons to check it out
- 243 Well Street, Hackney, London E9 6RG — a 25-minute walk from Dalston Superstore, not the same neighbourhood some guides file it under
- Founded by Alex Loveless and Clara Solis, who ran body2body, Dalston Superstore's trans masc night, before opening this as a permanent room in May 2024
- Café by day, wine and cocktails by night: Mon–Tue 16:00–23:00, Wed & Sun 11:00–23:00, Thu–Sat 11:00–23:30, walk-ins only, no bookings
- Clara Solis hand-painted the tiles herself, after Portuguese azulejos and Picasso's Minotaur drawings — the bar is a piece of her own work, not a mood board
- The fig tree in the garden is real and it is the point: this is a Madrid corner café rebuilt in Hackney, not a themed bar performing one
A bar tells you what it thinks of itself in the first material choice it makes, and La Camionera's is a set of hand-painted tiles behind the bar that its co-owner made herself. Not commissioned, not sourced from a supplier catalogue — Clara Solis painted them, working from Portuguese azulejos and Picasso's Minotaur drawings. That is a different kind of building than most bars bother to be.
First, the correction: this is Hackney, not Dalston
Get the geography right before anything else, because plenty of listings don't. La Camionera is at 243 Well Street, Hackney, E9 6RG. Dalston Superstore, the venue this bar's whole origin story runs through, is a 25-minute walk away on Kingsland High Street — a different postcode, a different high street, a different night out. Filing this under "Dalston" isn't a rounding error; it sends someone to the wrong side of the borough.
Built by the people who ran the night, not booked it
Alex Loveless, a trans masc musician and DJ, and Clara Solis, a Spanish artist, ran body2body at Dalston Superstore — a trans masc night, not a general queer club night, which matters for reading everything that came after. A promoter who books a room learns what a crowd wants for one evening at a time. Someone running a recurring night for the same community learns what that community is missing the other six days.
What they built to answer it started as a pop-up: a fortnightly evening in the basement of a Broadway Market cocktail bar, in February 2024. It went viral in the least metaphorical sense — practically every queer woman in east London descended on the market for the opening night, turning a Wednesday into a street party nobody had scheduled.
From £80,000 raised to a lease on Well Street
The response funded what came next: close to £80,000 raised in a few weeks, enough to take a lease, gut a shopfront on Well Street and open as a full-time venue in late May 2024. The founders and press covering the opening called it London's first FLINTA-owned (female, lesbian, intersex, non-binary, trans and agender) lesbian space in over a decade — a claim that lands harder once you know more than 60% of London's LGBTQ+ venues closed between 2006 and 2022.
A room built like the bars Clara grew up going to
The design brief, worked with Studio Popelo and Wet Studio, was Iberian rather than generically "queer bar": the couple wanted something closer to the café-bars Clara's family frequents near Madrid than to London's louder, darker queer nightlife rooms. That shows up in the choices — brushed aluminium bar, powder-blue flooring, rough plaster walls left exposed after demolition uncovered them, dark wood, cinnamon-red painted ceiling, stained-glass pendant lights, second-hand furniture, a salvaged timber door slid across the staff room entrance.
Coffee by day, and a real fig tree out back
It also shows up in what the room is for at different hours. Coffee and pastries in the daytime, wine and cocktails after dark — a genuinely testable claim, since the same door is open on both sides of it.
And out back, past windows that open the whole rear wall to the garden: a fig tree, whitewashed sculptural seating, rosemary and oleander. It reads less like garden furniture than like the one detail a Madrid corner bar would have that a themed replica wouldn't bother getting right.
Hours, the walk-in policy, and getting a seat
Monday and Tuesday, 16:00–23:00. Wednesday and Sunday, 11:00–23:00. Thursday to Saturday, 11:00–23:30. Happy hour runs daily 16:00–19:00. The venue currently operates walk-ins only — the earlier table-booking system has been dropped, per its own site, though online listings still floating around from 2024–25 sometimes describe a bookable table that no longer exists.
Walk-in-only at a room this talked-about means what you'd expect: reviewers describe getting in after 3pm on a Saturday as close to impossible, and a Thursday evening reaching capacity by 7pm. The daytime café side is the more testable proposition — a weekday morning coffee, tiles and all, without the queue that builds by early evening.
Service reports are mixed once the room fills — some reviewers describe attentive staff, others describe curt ones on a busy night. That split tracks with the queue pattern above: a small room running walk-in-only at capacity is a harder shift to staff evenly than an empty one.
Accessibility, and the press since opening
Front-of-house — entrance, bar, main seating, bathrooms — is wheelchair accessible; the rear section and garden require three steps, with a handrail.
The bar has drawn coverage from Wallpaper*, i-D, Dazed and PinkNews since opening — none of it surprising once you've seen the queue for a lesbian café-bar with hand-painted tiles on a Thursday in Hackney.
Press, Instagram, and the rest of the map
Follow @camionera.e9 for what's actually on — singles nights, life drawing, readings and seasonal pop-ups get posted there and don't always make it onto a fixed schedule anywhere else. For the wider east London queer map, Dalston Superstore is the club-scale room this bar's founders came from, and Gay's the Word is the bookshop end of the same city.
Sources: La Camionera — official site (hours, accessibility, walk-in policy), PinkNews — New lesbian bar La Camionera officially opens in London, Wallpaper* — The Hackney bar reviving London's legacy of lesbian spaces, Dazed — La Camionera: How the stars aligned for London's new lesbian bar, i-D — Inside La Camionera, the Heart of London's 'Lesbian Renaissance', Dalston Superstore — body2body event page, CAMRA — La Camionera, Hackney (pub listing), The Infatuation — La Camionera review (queue/crowd behaviour), La Camionera — Instagram (@camionera.e9)
