Today (2 July 2025), we unveiled a blue plaque at 239 King’s Road, Chelsea, marking the building that was once home to the Gateways Club. For over fifty years (c.1931–1985), this basement club was London’s best-known and longest-lived lesbian social venue, becoming a vital haven and discreet landmark for generations of LGBTQ+ women. Its formerly unassuming dull green door – now repainted in bright green – concealed a vibrant underground world that evolved from a bohemian drinking club into a dedicated women-only space, offering sanctuary and community when public acceptance for same-sex relationships was rare and legal protections non-existent.

Rebecca Preston, Historian at English Heritage, said:

“The Gateways Club in Chelsea holds a profoundly significant place in British LGBTQ+ history and the site remains an important one in the wider history of the capital. For over five decades, it offered a precious safe space where lesbian women could be themselves, free from judgement, harassment, and the prying eyes of the law. This blue plaque commemorates a venue of great social significance.”

Originally a bohemian Chelsea drinking club established around 1931, the Gateways attracted artists, writers, and musicians. While lesbian clientele, including figures like Radclyffe Hall, were always part of its mix, it was under the proprietorship of Ted Ware during the Second World War – and later his wife Gina and her partner Smithy – that its status was solidified as a welcoming venue for lesbian women. The club’s unique atmosphere fostered a diverse clientele: “a mixture of artists and anybody who was different, who was camp. Whether you were gay or black or Jewish or whatever, in those days, everybody mixed because you were all in a minority group,” as one member recalled. Celebrities like Joan Collins, Diana Dors and Dusty Springfield also visited this lively underground space.

Until the 1960s, the Gateways’ legendary status was attained largely by word of mouth. Maureen Duffy's entry on Lesbian London, in Hunter Davies’s The New London Spy of 1966, brought the club to wider notice, revealing a vibrant subterranean world with a “distinct preference for songs to and about girls” on the jukebox. In 1967, it introduced a women-only policy, and attracted mainstream attention, at first through a BBC Man Alive documentary, which presented it as a place where they could “dance, drink, flirt and discuss their problems”, and then in the controversial 1968 film, The Killing of Sister George.

The Gateways finally closed its doors on 23 September 1985, under pressure from more same-sex bars nationally, evolving social attitudes, and local gentrification. Yet its legacy as an important cultural landmark endures, not least for the countless women from all walks of life who found a safe space behind its discreet green door.

The English Heritage London Blue Plaques scheme is generously supported by David Pearl and members of the public.