Join Open City for an alternative architectural walking tour exploring queer place-making in London’s pleasure district of Soho and the surrounding area of Piccadilly, focusing on lesbian, bisexual and trans identities.
This insightful walking tour — led by Golden Key Academy graduate Imogen Steinberg — will tell the story of how queer people have created spaces for community, friendship, sexual freedom and activism. The tour will focus on several interesting individuals whose unique stories of sexuality and gender presentation over the last few centuries can be told through Soho’s enigmatic built environment.
We will discover how the development of John Nash’s plan for Piccadilly was shaped by the in-house architects at British restaurant chain store J Lyons & Co, and how recent architectural practices have riffed off local conventions and planning constraints to create new places which in turn affect how we use and move through the city.
Stepping back into the hidden world of possibilities that is Soho, we will consider the public and the private, belonging, respectability, ‘mainstream-ification’ and the ongoing impact of licensing laws.
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