Bimini says nightclub closures are eroding the soul of LGBTQ+ communities

Britain’s queer spaces are under threat

Their post landed only a few days after Charles Street Tap, another fixture of the same scene, confirmed it would close its doors for good in September.

Two venues, one city, barely a week apart and, as Bimini has now warned, a pattern that is steadily stripping something irreplaceable out of British queer life.

The RuPaul’s Drag Race star, drag artist and musician told BBC Newsnight that the closure of nightclubs and music venues is eroding the “soul” of LGBTQ+ communities.

The numbers behind the warning are stark: according to London Authority data, more than half of all queer spaces in the capital shut down between 2006 and 2022, falling from 125 venues to 50.

Bimini: ‘the first place people get to go to meet other people like themselves’

Speaking on the programme, and in comments reported by the Mirror, Bimini framed the losses as a question of infrastructure rather than nostalgia. “Nightclubs and venues are sometimes the first place people get to go to meet other people like themselves,” they said. “They’re so important to our culture and the fabric of our society.”

The venues that have already gone

The roll call of recent closures is a map of the scene’s best-known corners. G-A-Y Bar in Soho has gone. So has The Glory in east London. In Brighton, R-Bar and Charles Street Tap have both now announced they are finished.

They are closing against a backdrop of wider pub and bar closures across the UK, but queer venues carry an added weight: when one shuts, the community it served does not simply move down the road.

R-Bar’s management were blunt about what happens next, calling on people to support their local LGBTQ+ venues, because those spaces “can only survive if we continue to use them”.

Planning, property and the squeeze on nightlife

Bimini also pointed to the effect of residential development on established nightlife districts, arguing that venues with deep cultural roots are increasingly being pushed out by what is built around them. “It takes out the soul and the heart and the grit of it,” they said.

That tension is playing out in public in London, where Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan has repeatedly backed the night-time economy in a series of rows with a council over proposals that would prevent new pubs and bars from opening in Soho and the West End and require existing ones to serve last orders by 10pm. The same draft proposal floated a ban on so-called “vertical drinking”.

Which brings it back to Brighton, and to an Instagram post from a bar that has run out of time. Bimini’s warning is not really that the parties are ending; it is that the rooms where people found each other are being counted down, one lease at a time. On the current numbers, the case for using them while they are still open is difficult to argue with.