Memories of LGBTQ+ Croydon past

I’m sure for lots of our readers John Grindrod needs no introduction. But for those of you who have yet to come across his name, the New Addington-raised author calls himself a social historian of modern places. However we like to think of him as a champion of post-war architecture (especially our beloved 60s skyscrapers in Croydon). We last chatted with John back in 2022 when his book Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain had just been published. Today is the publication date of his new book, Tales of the Suburbs: LGBTQ+ Lives Behind Net Curtains. To mark the day we asked John to share an extract to whet our appetites. So over to John for his memories of LGBTQ+ Croydon past.

On the edge of the City of London an enormous rainbow flag hangs above commuters pouring from Liverpool Street Station. It announces the Bishopsgate Institute, through whose ornate Arts and Crafts doorway I step one spring morning in 2022. Everything about the place feels a little magical, a secret survivor from another age, like encountering a suffragette chained to a Lime bike or a music hall drag artist having a quick sherry outside the Tesco Express. Its long corridors, like the arteries of a Victorian hospital, lead to the sunken rear of the building, where sits an astonishing archive. A vast collection of queer material, donated slowly over decades, from personal libraries and private stashes, has been collected by Stef Dickers, Special Collections and Archives Manager, and his team.

Their database reveals a collection of newsletters from CAGS, the Croydon Area Gay Society, dating from the 1970s to the 1990s. Despite attending a couple of their events I’d completely forgotten their existence until this moment. Reading these A5 photocopied newsletters is not just time travel, it’s taking me to a different place too, away from the heart of the metropolis and out to the semi-detached streets of my childhood, taking me to moments I can’t quite believe ever happened there. Some are serious, some trivial, but all are deeply Croydon and entirely gay. What catches my eye immediately are the lists of events. A newsletter from 1981 offers up Coffee ‘n’ chat at Arthur’s (Epsom) from 8pm. Below that there’s the group’s monthly meeting at a Unitarian church hall, Tea and Symphony – music tea and chat at Graham’s. Chat is the word that binds these events, it seems. Next there’s Women-only coffee evening at Jane’s from 8pm. I pick up handfuls of newsletters, hunting out more of these listings. Treasure Hunt in the Surrey Hills starting on Epsom Downs, with a picnic and 2 country houses en route.

The curious details of a bygone suburbia that illuminate these newsletters help form the spine of my book, Tales of the Suburbs: LGBTQ+ Lives Behind Net Curtains, for which I also interviewed dozens of people from around the country about their extraordinary twentieth century experiences to tell a story of hidden lives and strange encounters and escapes.

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As the 1970s are drawing to a close, a small group of gay men and women are standing in the Whitgift Centre in Croydon handing out flyers, and are finding it an unexpected thrill ride. This is the Croydon Area Gay Society, as recorded in a newsletter. Any passing shopper who takes a flyer and doesn’t immediately bin it will spot a list of forthcoming events for a festival called Stonewall 1979. It’s been ten years since the not-yet-famous-in-Croydon riot in Christopher Street, New York, and this festival has been dreamt up to mark that moment. Who could have imagined the ripples of that night reaching all the way here, to the people stood outside Dorothy Perkins on a Saturday afternoon with their badges and photostats, and the many they hand them to. They’ve been busy, putting up posters around the borough, promoting events in the Croydon Advertiser, and standing here for a third day in a row, meeting shoppers face to face and telling them about their events programme of discos, raffles and coffee evenings. I’d have been eight at the time, and the thought that such a public acknowledgement of LGBTQ+ culture was going on then in such a familiar and unlikely place blows my mind.

I’m reminded of this because in late 2023 a film is released that echoes my experience of that place. In it there are the shadows of so many of my gay generation’s preoccupations: the AIDS crisis; the plea for acceptance from our parents and peers; those struggles with depression and loneliness. Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers has been largely shot in the director’s home town of Croydon, where the ghosts of protagonist Adam’s long-dead parents allow him to have adult conversations he was never able to at the time. Haigh even filmed some of it in the house he grew up in, a defeated-looking 1930s semi in the stockbroker suburb of Sanderstead. A key scene in the film sees Adam, the central character, return to his favourite childhood spot, a café in the Whitgift Centre, near where those flyers were being handed out many decades before.

I worked for some years in a bookshop in the Whitgift Centre. Now a Waterstones, back in the 1970s and 80s it was called Websters, and each year they would have a window celebrating what was then Gay Pride Week. While many high street shops shied away from carrying any LGBTQ+ themed books and magazines, Websters had no such qualms. In fact here, a few doors along from a vast Woolworths, you could see books published by the new Gay Men’s Press and lesbian literature from feminist publishers the Women’s Press and Virago, alongside LGBTQ+ magazines and Pride badges all displayed in the window. Before the nineties concept of the ‘pink pound’ gay shoppers were used to not being catered for at all, or finding these sorts of publications carried as some sort of guilty secret, hidden away on a single shelf, away from the inquisitive glances of families. They’re the only shop to stock Gay News in the town centre, and this flourishing of LGBTQ+ counterculture proudly displayed in the window in the mainstream heart of suburbia must cause a flutter in the heart of the LGBTQ+ shoppers passing by.

‘Yes, we were ridiculed by some,’ wrote one of the Stonewall 79 volunteers of their experience handing out flyers and advice. ‘Yes, others responded angrily, but others (rather more than this optimist anticipated) stopped to give encouragement, support and thanks, and others sought advice. On the day of the Carnival two total strangers who said they weren’t gay stopped for half an hour to hand out leaflets!’ Here in the heart of the suburbs something that all of us strangers could benefit from.