The upper frontage of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in November 2014
Immovate, the international property developers who own the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, today launched an extraordinary attack on RVT Future, the group campaigning to keep the iconic London LGBTQ venue alive as a site of community and culture.
In an open letter posted to a website managed by RVT chief executive James Lindsay, Immovate claims that if it is made a listed building “the RVT will be forced to close” and that “any closure of the RVT due to a listing will be the responsibility of the RVT Future campaign”.
In response, RVT Future told Immovate and James Lindsay: “If you close the RVT following a listing, the responsibility will be yours alone.”
RVT Future fears that Immovate plans to demolish the RVT and build flats or a hotel. The campaign has applied to Historic England to make the Tavern the nation’s first building to be listed for its significance to LGBTQ heritage. (Full disclosure: I am an executive committee member of RVT Future and wrote the listing application.)
Built around 1862, the Tavern is believed to be the oldest continually operating LGBTQ venue in the UK, with links back to the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens that opened on the same site in 1661.
Hundreds of pubs and other businesses operate successfully out of listed buildings. Immovate have offered no evidence that a listing would represent an unsustainable burden.
Immovate’s open letter is signed by company executives Martin Kurschel and Xaver Kriechbaum and posted to a website James Lindsay created to oppose the listing. Lindsay is one of the former owners of the RVT who sold it to Immovate last year. He then came to an arrangement to run the Tavern for five years.
Immovate’s open letter includes the extraordinary revelation that Lindsay pays no rent, leaving open the question of what the business model for the site could be.
The open letter also claims that the RVT “has lost money for six of the past ten years, and operational [sic] has never made a profit overall”. According to publicly available accounts, however, the RVT made profits in 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.
RVT Future has responded with an open letter of its own, telling Immovate and James Lindsay:
“If you close the RVT following a listing, the responsibility will be yours alone.”
The campaign poses the following questions, which it says Immovate and James Lindsay have yet to answer:
• “What are your long-term and short-term plans for the RVT?”
• “Do you care what the RVT community thinks of those plans?”
• “Can you guarantee that the RVT will remain an LGBTQ pub and performance venue under your ownership?”
• “Are you willing to sell a stake in the RVT to a community group?”
• “How can you claim to value the views of a community you consistently refuse to meet with?”
• “Why would you spend millions of pounds buying the RVT without expecting to make a penny from it – or entrust it gratis to someone you believe has a track record of losing money year after year?”
• “Wouldn’t an owner who genuinely cherished the RVT welcome the idea of it being the first building in the nation to be listed for its significance to LGBTQ heritage – not only out of justifiable pride but because of the tremendous local, national and international promotional opportunities such a status would bring?”
• “Given all of the above, isn’t it more plausible that your intention is and always has been to close the RVT and redevelop the site as a more profitable venture (such as retail and flats or a hotel) – and that you oppose a listing because it would get in the way of such a plan?”
• “So we ask once again: will you talk to us? Writing a threatening open letter that repeats your PR plan is not the same as actually engaging with the community you claim to want to represent.”
The listing campaign has the support of Mayor of London Boris Johnson; Paul O’Grady, who developed his legendary character Lily Savage at the RVT; Sir Ian McKellen; Stephen Beresford, writer of the film Pride, in which the RVT appears as itself; and many others including RVT performers and promoters, LGBTQ charities, local residents’ associations, architects, historians, theatre academics, MPs, Lambeth councillors, London Assembly members, peers and the local vicar, who calls her church “the Tavern’s younger sister”.
For more information about RVT Future, join its mailing list at www.rvt.community or see the campaign’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. You can read its open letter responding to Immovate here.
