The Common Press Dalston

Start with what the building used to be, because that's the part that tells you something.

97 Stoke Newington Road was The Pubb until it closed, reopened briefly under that name in late 2024, and then closed again. In June 2026 it became The Common Press Dalston — a second site for the queer intersectional bookshop that's run its original Shoreditch shop on Bethnal Green Road since 2021. Same floor plate, same corner-plot footprint that made it a pub in the first place, entirely different function: bookshelves where the bar back was, a café counter, and an events space that keeps the room working after dark the way the pub once did.

That's not a small detail in a city that's been losing queer venues faster than it opens them — London lost 58% of its LGBTQ+ spaces between 2006 and 2016, per UCL's Urban Laboratory research, mostly to conversion into straight venues or outright demolition. A former pub converting into a queer bookshop-café-bar runs the tape backwards, and the room's continuity — the site kept its use as a place people drink and gather, just changed who runs it and for whom — is the more interesting story than "new bookshop opened."

What's actually in the room

The Dalston site is Black queer and trans-run, open 11am–5pm Wednesday to Sunday with later hours on event nights, and it carries the same three-function stack as the Shoreditch original: bookshop, café/bar, and a programmed events floor. The early Google reviews are thin (17 at last count) but unanimous — a five-star average is high enough on its own to note, but it's the register of the comments that says more: relief that a queer venue is opening here, not another one closing.

Photo: Rhagfyr, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons — the Shoreditch original, not the Dalston room described here.

The bookshop half is the anchor. The Shoreditch original — reviewed by The Infatuation as "part queer bookshop-cafe, part de facto meeting place for Shoreditch bibliophiles and local characters" — carried it through a real existential scare: a 2024 funding gap forced a public crowdfunder that hit its target that December. Opening a second site eighteen months after nearly closing the first one is the kind of detail that belongs in the piece, not left out because it complicates the good-news version.

Programming is where the events space actually earns its floor space rather than sitting empty between rushes — book launches, workshops, socials, the kind of calendar that needs a room that isn't just a shop. Dalston Superstore is a five-minute walk north on Kingsland High Street if you're building a night around this end of Dalston — different register entirely (bar and basement club versus bookshop and café), but the same neighbourhood's queer-venue density, which is worth noting on a night that could easily have gone the other way for both of them.