The queer history of a corner of the Northern line extension

In south London the Northern line Extension (or NLE) runs from Kennington to Battersea Power Station for the new Nine Elms regeneration project. Set for completion in 2021, these are the first new stations on the line for eighty years.  

One of the two new stations is at Nine Elms, a site which used to host two high-rise buildings known as the Market Towers and a bar called the Market Tavern. The second new station is at Battersea Power Station. These new stations are intended to regenerate the Vauxhall, Nine Elms and Battersea areas, but work on the extension has also revealed surprising links between the Underground and the area’s queer history. 

In 1974 London’s wholesale market for flowers, fruit and vegetables moved from its home base in Covent Garden, now home to the London Transport Museum, to New Covent Garden at Nine Elms. To accommodate the new market porters, a pub with a special late licence was opened called the Market Tavern. It was built into the first floor of a concrete office block. For the first couple of years it hosted the porters and traders who worked at the markets, who came in after work to one of its two rooms.  

During the early 1980s its second room slowly turned into a gay clubbing hot spot.  Because of the pub’s late licence, people would come down from Soho and the West End after that area closed at 11pm and carry on drinking into the early hours.    

The Market Tavern grew into a solely queer venue. With flyers boasting ‘South London’s first gay pub with a 2am licence’, it hosted all sorts of people and many different nights from 1983 onwards.  

During the 1990s the Tavern hosted nights like ‘Kiss’, a women only night, described as a place where ‘lesbians could be accepted as themselves’. The Tavern also hosted the Wig’n’Casino, a gay northern soul night. The founder of the night described it as being from the time where ‘anything was possible’.  

In its heyday the Tavern hosted traditional drag cabaret from the likes of Adrella to more radical performers such as The Divine David, who once cut himself out of a cardboard box using a kitchen knife to a glam rock tune by Alvin Stardust. Freddie Mercury was said to frequent the Tavern’s leather nights.

In 2018, Transport for London’s contemporary art showcase Art on the Underground commissioned Nina Wakeford, a senior reader at the Royal College of Art (RCA) and Goldsmiths University, to produce a body of work for the new Northern line extension.  

Discovering that the tunnelling on the new section was being managed by a former DJ at the Market Tavern, Mark Thompson, inspired the LGBT+ strands of the project. This culminated in a four-hour ‘Historic TrackWalk’ with queer Northern line drivers walking through the new tunnels to pay homage to the area’s rich LGBT+ history, creating a new kind of queer space. They played music as they went, from The Animals to Soft Cell, House and Hi-NRG, explaining their choices and pondering the personal links between mining, politics and gay club culture in the 1980s. They scattered red ribbons to remember the London Underground staff who had lost their lives to HIV and Aids.  

The walk was the most important part of the commission for Wakeford: ‘All of this is something that has built the new “Pink Depot”. We are exploring this idea of what it takes to make a building and what a building is.’ 

Alongside flower sellers, market porters and club promoters, the drivers took part in interviews about their experiences at the Market Tavern and the local area and talked about being queer and working for Transport for London. The recordings were transcribed and edited into a book and incorporated into a performance and exhibition by Wakeford at the new Studio RCA gallery. Nina produced a set of cyanotype artworks in the tunnels, and adapted one into a poster for the Underground, about the layered history of the area. 

This article was written by Christopher Thomas, with input from Curators Simon Murphy and Ellie Miles, working as part of our Young Freelancer programme