Structural issues delay The Black Cap’s reopening, but Alex Green, a queer cabaret performer and campaigner, remains hopeful
BY EMILY WARNER, IMAGES PROVIDED
In 1981, 19-year-old Alex Green arrived in Camden, “young, naïve, stick thin and gorgeous”. He was soon immersed in a thriving queer scene, awash with colour, androgyny and fluidity. Central to this world was The Black Cap, a historic pub and queer performance venue which was popular from the mid-sixties until its closure in 2015.
Green recalls walking into The Black Cap for the first time, sporting an eighties mod suit and a blond, spiky hairstyle – a distant memory for his now bald head. He remembers with vivid detail the colourful atmosphere: tight jeans, spiky hair, black leather, lesbians gathered by the jukebox, a trans woman at the bar. “The whole world was there,” he says, and The Black Cap became his second home – until it wasn’t.
From the day it closed, Green has been leading the We Are The Black Cap campaign to reopen the pub. Now, ten years later, he talks to me from his living room in Greenwich as the pub’s future finally looks more hopeful.
The pub came under threat from property developers in 2014 when the owner, Stephen Cox, applied for planning permission to turn the upper floors into flats – a request which was denied. After a second failed attempt to redevelop the pub in April 2015, he closed The Black Cap: Camden’s last surviving LGBTQIA venue.
On the same night, the We Are The Black Cap campaign began. “We went into overdrive,” he says. “By Saturday the next week, there were a thousand people outside The Black Cap. Camden High Street was half closed, and we had a double decker bus with drag queens on it.”
The closing of The Black Cap came amidst an epidemic of queer venues shutting their doors. More than half of London’s LGBTQIA spaces closed between 2006 and 2022, according to Greater London Authority data. This was a tragedy for the community, as Alex explains: “These are lynchpin places where queer people deliver [their] art. When you’re in a straight place, you’re the entertainment, but to your own community, those jokes are a reinforcement of who we are. [We need] spaces that belong to us where we can tell these stories.”
These spaces have always existed, says Green, and have always been a radical way of speaking about queer lives.
During the AIDS crisis, the drag artists Lily Savage, David Dale and Regina Fong stopped some of their shows in The Black Cap to throw condoms at the audience. Green said: “[They were] saying ‘you guys aren’t taking this seriously. If you’re not wearing these, you’re going to be dead.’ That’s the first time I’d seen that and that’s why those spaces are important. That’s why I fight for them.”
Almost ten years later, the We Are The Black Cap campaign continues. “We’ve had a vigil there every single Saturday for nearly ten years now,” said Green. Behind the scenes, they have been fighting for ownership of the pub, investigating the mysterious finances behind its closure, and running the Black Cap Community Hub, a safe space for LGBTQIA people in Camden. “I think a lot of us – the poor people who have spent nine years of their lives doing this – are exhausted,” said Green.
In 2023, Green finally received a note from the new administrators of the pub, who took over when the previous owners went into receivership: “They wanted to renovate and reopen The Black Cap! Amazing.” They were also keen to collaborate, incorporating We Are The Black Cap’s vision for the space as a pub, nightclub, cabaret performance venue and community centre.
Excitement animates Green as he tells me: “It’s happening.” The initial plan was to reopen on 12 April 2025, exactly ten years after its closure. However, the redevelopment has hit a few stumbling blocks: rotten floor joists and other age-related problems, caused by the building sitting empty for so long. The project lead remains optimistic but now faces the challenge of presenting the revised cost, work plan, and timeline to the investors. If they approve the new budget, work should restart at the end of April for a 30-week build – pushing the reopening to late November 2025. “They’ve spent over £300k so far,” Green points out. “I don’t think they’ll want to throw that away.”
Green says: “It’s been a long campaign – God it has – but I met some of the most important people in my life in that pub.”
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