The Friends of the Joiners Arms is a community campaign established in 2014 to fight the closure of the Joiners Arms. The pub had operated for 18 years as a gay bar and a staple of east London's queer nightlife before closing its doors in 2015. It was due to be demolished to make way for office spaces and luxury flats as part of a redevelopment project managed by property developers Regal Homes. Campaigners held their first meeting in the pub one month before the closure. While the campaign was initially formed to oppose the closure, it is now raising money to open London's first community-owned, community-run queer pub (discussed in Chapter 5). In its first few years, the group established important connections and solidarities with other pubs and spaces affected by closure in London. This included the campaign organized to reopen the Black Cap in Camden, another queer pub that was forced to close its doors to make space for a redevelopment project. Campaigners refer to these as their ‘sister campaigns’, inviting us to read the closure of the Joiners Arms as part of a larger complex of interrelated struggles against the closure of community spaces in London, such as struggles to save the Latin Villages in Seven Sisters and Elephant and Castle, as well as more recent efforts against the Truman Brewery redevelopment in Tower Hamlets.

At the time of research, the group had over 6,000 likes on their Facebook page. However, the vast majority of its day-to-day activities were run by a group of around ten people, most of whom lived in east London. Some of the campaigners met at the Joiners Arms and were friends with David, the owner, with whom they shared a passion for left-wing politics and storytelling. Others were former patrons, but did not know the other campaigners. Others still joined the campaign having never even been to the pub. I started frequenting the Joiners Arms in 2012, the year I moved to London. I ended up going back to the pub a few times over the following years until its closure in 2015.

I was invited to my first campaign meeting by friend and activist Dan Glass, who assured me I would find it ‘stimulating’.