LGBTQ history through architecture and design
To celebrate Pride Month, we’re tracing LGBTQ history through the work of pioneering architects and designers, plus the groundbreaking buildings that have been at the heart of the long fight for equality in the UK. Whether in the architecture that allowed gay men to live together in the years before decriminalisation, or the defiant, influential and often overlooked careers of designers, these stories offer a window into the realities of life for LGBTQ people in this country and beyond. Here are five you might not have heard before.
St. Ann’s Court
Sir Raymond McGrath’s St. Ann’s Court was designed in the mid-1930s for stockbroker Gerald Schlesinger, replacing an 18th-century cottage on the carefully landscaped site in Surrey. Built 30 years before the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the distinctively round modernist house included a double bed that could be split into two and screens that would divide the room to create the impression that Schlesinger and his partner, architect Sir Christopher Tunnard, slept in different rooms. It stands today both as a legacy of McGrath’s bold and inventive approach – he described it as his “most ambitious work” – and of a not-so-recent past when gay men lived in fear of persecution.
Islington Town Hall
Same-sex couples have been able to recognise their relationships in civil partnerships in England and Wales since 2005, but it wasn’t until 2014 that they were afforded the same level of legal recognition as opposite-sex couples. At a minute past midnight on 29th March, Peter McGraith and David Cabreza became the first gay couple to marry at Islington Town Hall. Apart from representing a landmark in the struggle for equality, the wedding thrust Edward Charles Philip Monson’s sober, pared-back neoclassical building into the limelight – an appropriately serious backdrop to a joyful and long-awaited celebration.
The work of Enid Marx
The painter and designer Enid Marx is best known for her moquette seat fabrics, which from the end of the 1930s were familiar to Londoners travelling on the tube and buses. Committed to accessible and affordable design, she would go on to sit on the advisory panel for the Board of Trade’s ‘Utility Furniture’ – an initiative that provided inexpensive furniture in the post-war period and which required Marx to create modern and stimulating patterns that were also simple to produce. While her design work is considered to be a high point in British modernism, Marx also worked to preserve the material heritage of the country, publishing books on English folk arts with her partner, historian Margaret Lambert.
The work of Eileen Gray
Eileen Gray did not find critical success until 1972, four years before her death at the age of 98. Having moved to Paris in 1906 to study Japanese lacquerwork under Seizo Sugawara – with such dedication that she developed ‘lacquer disease’, a painful rash on her hands – Gray went on to produce textiles and furniture, which she sold at her gallery Jean Désert; she became increasingly influenced by the industrial, clean aesthetic of modernism. Restlessly creative, her most famous work – a villa on the Côte d’Azur – was designed without architectural training and completed when she was 51. The house was admired by Le Corbusier, who, against Gray’s wishes, painted murals on the walls (he would later be found dead on the beach below the house, having gone swimming against his doctor’s advice). One, entitled Three Women, is thought to be a reference to Gray’s bisexuality.
Derek Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage
Filmmaker Derek Jarman bought Prospect Cottage after he was diagnosed with HIV in 1986. The small wooden building sits on the vast shingle headland of Dungeness in Kent – a bleak setting, in the shadow of a nuclear power station, redeemed by the colour and playfulness of the garden Jarman created there. Tended until his death in 1994, the garden was a creative refuge for Jarman, and survives today – complete with his flotsam sculptures – thanks to the efforts of his partner, Keith Collins, and a successful campaign led by Jarman’s collaborators, Tilda Swinton and Sandy Powell.
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