The bar, lined with Beefeater gin, a dish full of strip matches adorned with a nude woman, metal countertops bare the unmistakable patina of hackney lesbianism. La Camionera, London’s hottest lesbian bar, has become a meeting point, deeply lodged within the hearts of the community.
Camionera's fame was almost instantaneous, becoming viral on TikTok. When it first launched as a pop-up on Broadway Market, snapshots of lingerie-clad bodies reclining among cocktails turned the bar into a meme-like phenomenon. London’s sapphic community flocked en masse, overwhelming the narrow strip of East London pavement. The crowds were so large and spirited that the police arrived in what can only be described as an ironic misreading of queer joy as public menace. If ever there were a testament to the acute need for lesbian and queer-only spaces in London, it was the opening of La Camionera’s first space.
Faced with this unexpected demand, owners Alex Loveless and Clara Solis responded decisively, deciding to open up a permanent space. La Camionera’s new home, nestled on 243 Well Street, feels like the lovechild of an old-school speakeasy and a utopian queer commune: “We didn’t really have any money. My girlfriend and I both had a little bit of savings, and we crowdfunded for the rest”, and thus began La Camionera, as a permanent space.
Clodagh Farrelly, founding member and designer who helped build the Well Street space, notes the first day she got the keys: “We started working on it as soon as we got the space, knocking walls down, pulling up the floors. I got friends in set design to help, carpenters etc. anyone we knew who had skills who could help us with this crazy idea, it became my entire life. I took a hiatus from working on sets in film to building a lesbian bar”.
Farrelly notes that when she was designing the space, it was important that it fit into Well St. and the community that already existed there, “I wanted us to fit into Well St. instead of infiltrate it, and it was really nice, all the locals would come and get their coffee from the lesbian bar, and it just came part of the street”.
Negronis and natural wines flow freely, though the libations are often secondary to the spatial choreography of queer sociality: the bumping into exes, exes' exes etc. Lesbian bars have long served as spaces of refuge and resistance. In the mid-20th century, lesbian bars were often clandestine, hidden from public view by necessity functioning as sanctuaries against the dual forces of state surveillance and societal exclusion. Policed not just by the law but also by heteronormative moral codes, the survival of the lesbian bar, is a marked act of queer defiance.
London’s first known lesbian bar, The Gateways Club, opened in Chelsea in the 1930s and remained a cornerstone of the city’s queer culture until its closure in 1985. Films like The Killing of Sister George (1968) immortalised bars like the Gateways, its legacy emblematic of an era when lesbian spaces were both necessary and vulnerable. Subsequent decades saw an ebb and flow of lesbian bars, from Candy Bar in Soho to SheBar, some of which have since been closed. As cities like London become increasingly inhospitable to independent venues, the economic precarity of running a niche bar often proves insurmountable. The closure of lesbian bars reflects a broader cultural erasure, which is why La Camionera’s position within London is so important.
Lesbian bars like La Camionera, respond to the historical and ongoing displacement of lesbian spaces, a nod to the lineage of spaces like the Gateways while asserting something more casual. Though the lesbian-bar archetypally cannot be read as apolitical, charged with resistance to heteronormative erasure — it must also be allowed to integrate into the banalities of everyday life, rather than be perpetually fetishised as a subversive space.
Founder Alex Loveless tells me how creating the space was not about recreating a typical gentrified queer space: “Camionera might look less gay to the untrained eye, but where we source our art, (paintings by Poppy Tingay of her friends and lovers, adorn the bathroom and hallway walls), as well as where get our wine and the people that work here”, Alex notes, “That is what makes Camionera a real gay bar. It is more than just stamping a pride flag on the wall”.
More than its difference, it still nods to the history of charged queer spaces, the community at large. To romanticise these spaces solely as sites of rebellion is to strip them of their ordinariness, their ability to hold the everyday encounters, and reflect the normalcy of queerness. Loveless notes, “The future of gay spaces are places that are not sensationalised. La Camionera is only a gay bar because I wanted to start a bar and all my friends are gay”. The capitalisation of pride, from sweltering Soho in June, to London corporate pride and rainbow logos, is heavily populated. La Camionera offers normalcy, outside of rainbow tokenism, a sentiment that heteronormative people have in all aspects of life: banality.
La Camionera becomes a living testament to the fluidity of queer space: not bound by the exceptionalism of the past, but also not forgetting it. It asserts that the lesbian bar is as much about joy and mundanity as it is about resilience and memory. In doing so, it honours the community at large — not just as it was, but as it continues to become.
