Soho clubs

Soho’s world-famous G-A-Y Bar has everything you’d expect: cheap drink offers, a young crowd and plenty of Britney. The G-A-Y night at Heaven gets the celebrity cameos, but this popular bar is still a shrine to queer pop idols, with nightly drinks promos every time they play a video from the current diva du jour. There’s also a women’s bar in the basement, called (delightfully) Girls Go Down – popular with flirty, studenty lesbians, loathed by most older women. G-A-Y bar’s plush late-night sibling, G-A-Y Late, is round the corner at 5 Goslett Yard.

Soho’s only exclusively lesbian venue – and the longest-running by far of London’s three queer femme bars – this basement venue is run by the team behind nearby Ku Bar and has a comparable flair for laying on entertainment. With comedy, cabaret, karaoke, drag shows and quiz evenings alongside a busy programme of clubs nights, She takes its role as a stalwart of London’s lesbian scene very seriously, and stays open til 1am five nights a week. 

The ultimate Soho shebeen, St Moritz has been packing them in for decades. Located beneath a Swiss restaurant (also called St Moritz), the basement club has retained much of the same décor it has had since the '60s, giving it a timeless London feel. Its flagship club night is Gaz's Rockin' Blues, helmed by legendary selector Gaz Mayall. It's been running there every Thursday for the past 30 years and still hosts turbo-charged live performances alongside ska, classic R&B and rock 'n' roll DJs each week. Long-running West End indie night Blow Up (which bears some responsibility for inventing Britpop) is in residence every Friday and at the other end of the musical spectrum, Decadence on Saturdays is a session of balls-out hair metal debauchery. That's three good reasons every week to visit this London institution.

Simon Hammerstein hit the scandalous jackpot with his New York club when it opened in 2007, combining flagrantly outrageous shows with high-rolling clientele and tales of behind-the-scenes controversy. Early in 2011, he opened the London branch on the site of the old Raymond Revue Bar to tabloid squawking. So what can you expect? For a start, you won't get in unless you have very deep pockets (table reservations are several thousand pounds) and/or know someone. If you do make it in, you'll see they've remodelled the place a treat, in a decadent-chocolate-box kind of way that seems to be to the taste of the mostly young, bouji clientele. The show is of a high technical standard, with mostly exclusive acts compered by mischievous MC Raven O. Some, especially the skills-based turns, are very strong; others tend to the titillating or have more production values than originality. The stand-out is the extraordinary Rose Wood, a transgendered performer whose pieces – generally heavy on nudity, violence and bodily fluids – aroused spluttering tabloid outrage but in fact bespeak a sophisticated, funny and deeply humane engagement with the context of the Box and the world beyond.