A walk through the ruins of East London’s queer spaces with artist Prem Sahib

In a Shoreditch backstreet, sandwiched between a hip music-venue and a railway bridge, stands one of a few original warehouses left in this affluent area of East London. On its run-down, bricked facade — now overshadowed by Norman Foster’s Principal Tower — an old bath house banner reads “open all day everyday,” inviting its gay clientele to enter via a front entrance.

“I think this is from when they had a bar,” remembers British artist Prem Sahib, inspecting the vintage-looking sign, advertising the now-defunct gay sauna Chariots. “I don’t think that was there when I was going,” he frowns, as he walks me around the vacant premises of the iconic venue, forced to close in 2016 after 20 years of existence, due to rampant gentrification. Sahib is one of six contemporary artists featured in Queer Spaces: London, 1980s to Today, which opened this week at the Whitechapel Gallery. As its title suggests, the show revisits the rich-yet-fragile histories of queer London.

In the past decade alone, 58% of LGBTQ+ licensed venues across the capital have had to close, often to make way for luxury developments and snazzy offices. The ephemeral nature of these spaces and their impact on collective memory is at the core of Sahib’s practice, which incorporates sculpture and installation, often evoking personal narratives in minimalist aesthetics. “The queer scene has had to persistently reinvent itself,” says the London artist, who is in his mid-thirties, “but one thing that I find concerning is that there is a lack of fixed social place.”

In 2017, Sahib’s solo exhibition at Kunstverein in Hamburg departed from a reflection on Chariots Roman Spa, as a community space where personal and public affect collide beyond the realm of the normative. Soon after the closure of the gay sauna, Sahib managed to salvage 12 lockers, discarded in the car park. The series, installed in the German exhibition under the title Do you care, we do (referencing an HIV prevention campaign) offers a fragmented vision into the multi-layered history of the place. Covered in doodles and stickers, the worn-out, deep-blue lockers reference personal, anonymous narratives as well as public-health prevention from the peak of the AIDS crisis.

“There were a lot of communities that converged there,” recounts Sahib, who also photographed the deserted bathhouse with artist friend Mark Bowler. “You had the trendy hipsters, the older locals, then the men who have sex with men but don’t identify as gay. I also met a few people who were queer or non-binary,” he continues. “For me it was also a community space and then because sex was also part of the design… I don’t know, I feel the community aspect gets overlooked.” The lockers series have since been acquired by Tate as part of their permanent collection, an ironic turn for these otherwise undesirable fragments of London’s history, which are now being “re-institutionalised,” much to Sahib’s delight.

As we continue our walk deeper into Hackney Road, we stop by the equally-famed former pubs George & Dragon and Joiners Arms, which both closed in recent years. The first, an eccentric mish-mash of retro decor and other curiosities —now replaced by a craft brewery — was home to the White Cubicle: arguably London’s smallest gallery which, as the name suggests, was housed within this fine establishment’s pissoir. Initiated by Mexican curator Pablo León de la Barra (now a curator at large for the Guggenheim) the subversive art space — since adopted by the Queen of Adelaide pub in Bethnal Green — hosted original works by the likes of Wolfgang Tillmans, General Idea, Celia Hempton, and Sahib himself. “Funnily enough, it wasn’t too dissimilar to the work I have now at the Whitechapel,” the artist laughs, describing the yellow lighting piece titled Liquid gold, now visible from street level at the London public institution, only in the evening.

Meanwhile the Joiners Arms, only a few doors down, had opened its doors in the 1990s as a predominantly working-class gay pub, soon becoming a landmark venue, regularly frequented by Alexander McQueen, Christopher Kane, Rufus Wainwright and immortalised in Block Party’s 2007 track On. Since its much-publicised closure in 2015, a campaign group has formed — endorsed by British actor Ian McKellen, among many others — demanding that the building be protected as a community asset, eventually forcing developers to include an LGBTQ+ pub as part of the scheme (the first time that the sexual orientation of a venue’s customers has been included as a condition of planning approval).

Standing in front of the barricaded building, Sahib and I share fond anecdotes about the time we both spent at the iconic dive, tainted by a mix of nostalgia and grief. But the inevitable question soon arises: amid the rapid gentrification of the area and its coinciding sanitisation, are we holding onto memories of something that has long ceased to exist? “The appetite is still there for people to have a space to go to, feel safe in and express themselves,” the artist says, as we discuss the shifts in social behaviours shaped by the rise of hook-up apps and progressive mainstream values, boosted by the Marriage Act in 2013. “I just think it has to be a space that is diverse, welcoming to queer people as well, not just an assimilated-style gay bar,” he says.

Indeed, since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, gay nightlife venues have been far from inclusive in the UK. Cis, white gay-men have too often set the agenda for the scene, excluding segments of the community along the way, up to this day. “There are so many problematic politics around Chariots, as an exclusionary space, one exclusively for gay men,” says Sahib. “There’s this crazy policing of queer and trans bodies that struggle to find social spaces. So, we need to remember that there is still a hostility for a huge part of our community, and that these spaces have a need.”

Queer Spaces: London from 1980s to Today, is up at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 25 August 2019