BLKOUT inCamden

Camden's Black queer history goes back further than most boroughs get to claim, and BLKOUT's own chapter is only the most recent of several.

In the 1720s, on or near Tottenham Court Road, a probably-free Black man named Julius Caesar Taylor ran a molly house — arrested and convicted in 1728 for "keeping a disorderly House" and "sodomitical Practices." It's one of the earliest documented instances of a Black man in London organising queer space for others, three hundred years before this door.

Two centuries later, a different kind of gathering formed around Regent's Park Road. John Payne, an American singer who'd settled in London after the First World War, bought a home at number 17 that became, in his contemporaries' words, "the place to be" for the Black musical and theatrical community — Paul Robeson stayed there, Marian Anderson and Ethel Waters passed through, and it was there that Lawrence Brown first met Robeson and began the musical partnership that lasted the rest of their lives. Payne was also part of what his friends simply called "the group": a gay social circle of African and Caribbean intellectuals in 1930s and 40s London that included the composer Reginald Foresythe and — already the anchor of our Croydon and Lambeth doors — Ivor Cummings, the civil servant who later welcomed the Windrush generation at Tilbury Docks. A few streets away in Primrose Hill, one genealogical record places bandleader Ken "Snakehips" Johnson on Gloucester Avenue in 1939 — a year before the Belgravia flat, shared with his partner Gerald Hamilton, where he was killed in the Blitz (now on our Westminster door); thinner sourcing, but a Camden thread of its own. And for thirty-eight years from 1929, the Grenadian-British cabaret star Leslie "Hutch" Hutchinson lived at 31 Steele's Road in Belsize Park — an English Heritage blue plaque marks the house today.

Organising took a different, collective shape in the 1980s. The Camden Lesbian Centre and Black Lesbian Group — with the Black Lesbian Group operating autonomously within it — opened its own building at 54-56 Phoenix Road on 31 October 1987, the UK's first and only dedicated lesbian centre. It ran until funding collapsed in the early 1990s, and its archive now lives four hundred miles away at Glasgow Women's Library. This is women's history, not this door's core focus, but it belongs in Camden's record — and in 2024 it came back into the borough itself, when Camden People's Theatre's GRILLS went looking for it and held a Black LGBTQ+ link-up for the group's former and current members after the show.

A century after Taylor, decades after Cummings and Payne, we added our own chapter. In December 2019 we launched Black Men Who Brunch — "a brand new monthly event that will be shaped for us, by us" — with founding partners Shade Free (the UK's Black-owned LGBT+ events brand) and Arboretum, a members' club. It grew fast: a February 2020 sequel, a run of themed editions through 2020 and 2021, and by February 2022 an eighth edition billed "Future History." Brunch found its home at Old Diorama Arts Centre on Drummond Street, and at Regent's Place — the Euston Road business estate where British Land named BLKOUT an LGBT+ Community Partner, with Triton Café hosting our monthly gatherings. By June 2022's twelfth edition, "Welcomes the Summer Kitchen," the series had, in our own words, "built and strengthened friendships and connections, put the world to rights, challenged loneliness and isolation, learned new skills from filmmaking to knitting."

Alongside it, a second Camden tradition took root outdoors. Nzube Ufodike had nurtured a summer picnic in Regent's Park for several years before asking BLKOUT to co-host in 2022 as the BLKOUTside Summer Picnic — new partners Slay Storiez, The Black Experience and the Black Boy Joy Collective joined that year, and a 'best dressed' theme became a running joke worth dressing up for. The tradition has run every year since. In 2026 it became the BLKOUT Annual Picnic: Sunday 16 August, on the Camden side of Regent's Park near the zoo, an unproduced day built to flex from a usual ~65 to hundreds — bring your crew, bring your sound — closing with karaoke at Zodiac Bar and a community collection for LGBT+ Rights Ghana.

We haven't found a space currently run by and for Black queer men in the borough — the panel below is where that gets built. But the ground has already been walked. If you were at a Brunch, or you've been coming to the picnic since before we were involved, the panel further down is where you tell us, and the page changes.

The 2021 Census recorded 9.0% of Camden's population — around 18,900 people — as Black, Black British, Black Welsh, Caribbean or African, up from 8.2% in 2011. Camden doesn't rank among London's ten largest Black populations, so we don't have a dossier figure for it — but applying the same estimate we use elsewhere, that's roughly 400 to 630 Black queer men living in the borough right now. These are working estimates and we welcome correction. The point is the scale: we were never a niche. We were just never counted.