I remember the first time I went to Heaven. I had only moved to London a few months before and I made plans to meet up with my friend Anna, the only other person I knew in the city. She brought a friend along, and the three of us went for dinner in Soho. Someone suggested an impromptu trip to Heaven, the UK’s most famous gay nightclub. We made a quick diversion en route for Anna’s friend to buy a can of deodorant from the off-licence before we were on our merry way.
We spent the night dancing to the likes of Robyn, Charli XCX and Lady Gaga. We met two handsome boys on the dancefloor who didn’t show much romantic interest in us but still hung around all night long. We stayed out late and each endured rude awakenings in the morning as we trudged into uni and work. It was only then that our friend realised she had bought and sprayed herself with a can of hairspray on our way to the club. The kind of joyful oversights one only seems to make at 22.
Heaven was once described by novelist Neil Bartlett as “the first room I ever walked into that contained a thousand other gay people”. Opened in the railway arches under Charing Cross station in 1979, it has weathered the Aids crisis, the chilling effects of Section 28 and has staved off closure while 60% of London’s LGBTQ+ nightclubs have closed since 2006. The club has become the training ground for numerous British drag queens. Adele once judged its infamous Thursday night stripping competition on the main stage.
But Heaven’s days might now be numbered. The owner has said that the landlord, the Arch Company, wants to raise the annual rent by £240,000, following an £80,000 increase last year. The news may not sound shocking: landlord threatening to shutter a cultural institution for failing to meet the unabating demands of the rental market? It’s a familiar tale in modern Britain.
What may be surprising is who stands behind the landlord and is ultimately responsible for overseeing its operations. The Arch Company was formed in 2019 after Network Rail sold off its real estate footprint, located mostly in rail arches. The company is now the largest landlord of small businesses in the UK and its property portfolio encompasses 5,200 railway arches, and numerous business estates and former station buildings across England and Wales. The company was created in a joint venture between London-based real estate firm TT Group and the New York-based asset manager Blackstone.
Blackstone is the world’s largest “alternative” asset manager, which mainly invests beyond the confines of securities listed on stock exchanges: in property, private equity, infrastructure, private debt and venture capital.
Blackstone has more than $1 trillion of assets under management and its portfolio includes everything from apartment buildings in Copenhagen to logistics parks in Guangzhou, and wind and solar farms stretching across the continental US. Blackstone even owns Supergoop!, a sunscreen staple of skincare influencers on TikTok, and the group is currently closing a deal to purchase Hipgnosis, a company that owns the rights to the music catalogues of Beyoncé, Shakira and Nelly Furtado. The next time I’m on the dancefloor and Hips Don’t Lie transitions seamlessly into Promiscuous, I’ll know assuredly that Blackstone has made a good return on its investment.
Blackstone is not the only financial institution shaping the landscape of queer venues across Britain’s capital city. G-A-Y Late, which closed at the end of last year and was also operated by the owners of Heaven, is being redeveloped by the planning arm of Dallas-based investment firm CBRE. The Joiners Arms on Hackney Road, a fixture of the east London queer night scene, is being redeveloped by Regal London, which partners with fund manager KKR on developments across the city.
Though private landlords of all kinds are displacing queer venues out to the margins of the city, asset managers and other financial institutions seem especially pernicious. People who run these institutions would say that when they acquire assets such as nightclubs, they are increasing efficiencies to make them more profitable. In reality, what we tend to see are workers facing lay-offs, company debt reaching untenable levels and services cut to the bone. After all, these firms are designed to deliver returns to investors, not to ensure a fun night out.
Asset managers also have teams of well-paid lawyers trained in circumventing rent laws and other protections for renters and small businesses. These factors have tangible consequences for a city’s residents: an article published in Germany last month reported that Blackstone-owned properties in Berlin had rents raised by 22% between 2019 and 2023, compared to 7% in the wider market.
Investment managers are not particularly fixated on the acquisition of LGBTQ+ venues or the wider infrastructure of the gay community, but these sites have become prime commodities for a number of reasons. The foremost is that marginalisation of the queer identity in the 20th century meant “gaybourhoods” emerged in “seedy” but central locations in cities, such as Soho in London, or the Meatpacking District in Manhattan. It’s likely why Heaven opened in the underbelly of a railway station in the first place.
Now that these areas are no longer hemmed-in enclaves of the undesirable, there is ample opportunity for financiers to generate sizeable returns through the capture of these venues as assets in their portfolios. While many in the queer community have rightfully criticised the way Pride month has become a means of laundering dubious corporation reputations, it is also time to ask how our community bears the cost of their lucrative operations. After all, when we lose another queer venue, who exactly gains?
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Adam Almeida is a writer and researcher living in London
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This article was amended on 14 June 2024. An earlier version said that “G-A-Y Late … is being redeveloped by Dallas-based fund manager CBRE.” To clarify: it is being redeveloped by the planning arm of Dallas-based investment firm CBRE.
