Field notes from The Backstreet, London’s lost leather club

Closing in 2022, the men-only joint left a hole in the city’s kink community. New exhibition Documents of a recent past tells The Backstreet's sexy stories with photos, text, sound and furniture.
Culture
Words: Joe Bobowicz
On Saturday 16th July 2022, East London leather and rubber club, The Backstreet, held its final cruise party – leaving behind a 37-year legacy that had survived Section 28, the AIDS crisis and vicious homophobia (the club’s front doors were eternally glazed in egg). To mark its role as a haven for gay kinksters, the Mile End venue, opened by John Edwards – by day a solicitor and board member of London Zoo – donated several of the contraptions and paraphernalia found inside to the London Museum and the Bishopsgate Institute’s queer archive, auctioning off the rest to former punters.
One such patron was Prem Sahib, a Southall-raised artist of Indian-Polish descent, who has just opened an exhibition in Southwest London at Studio Voltaire, Documents of a recent past. Held inside the gallery’s project space, the show is dedicated to The Backstreet’s sleazy interior and the sounds, conversations and music Prem overheard inside.
Living close to The Backstreet during the 2010s, Prem was always curious about the club. “I remember seeing a figure dressed in full leather smoking in the mews outside this unassuming black door,” Prem says, having first visited the space when Rick Owens hired out the venue for a fashion party in 2013.
Eventually, Prem took the plunge. “There was this night called Club Heros, and I decided to go. I realised it was actually really friendly.” After a positive experience – which involved lots of skintight and lycra gear – Prem soon became a regular at the venue’s naked nights on Wednesdays and Sundays, known as “BUFF”.


By the time 2017 came around, Prem was hearing whispers of neighbourhood development. Given his own artistic practice has long focused on memorialising queer sex spaces, Prem began photographing The Backstreet in the daytime, alongside fine art photographer Mark Blower. Previously, Prem has restaged darkrooms (DESCENT I. People Come & Go, 2019) or installed the actual lockers from the now-defunct Chariots sauna in Shoreditch (Do You Care? We Do, 2017) in gallery spaces, making this ode to The Backstreet a fitting chapter in their work.
The photographs in Documents of a recent past – some survey-style, some close-up and abstract – unfold in a slideshow of time-worn leather pageant posters, HIV pamphlets, ghillie nets and antique steel body cages appear, as the audience watches from authentic Backstreet leather stools.
There are charming details to the show, too, such as a film of dust lining equestrian boots or elegantly hung bondage. Even a bottle of Dettol by the till and drink mixers take on a sentimental quality, evoking forgotten encounters as well as idle bar chat. At regular intervals, full-screen blocks of colour punctuate the imagery, taken from moments where Prem has zoomed in to the extreme, giving the installation an affective jolt.
“I remember early on at [certain] nights, you would see people with their pints walking around and just looking at the walls as though it was a gallery,” Prem recalls. “For [the bar] to remain so static amidst so much change in that area is quite amazing. There’s this sense of time travel and histories being present in the walls, the patinas and the surfaces.”
The slides are complemented by a WIP piece, Footnotes for Heros. Here, a black screen flicks between some 270-plus footnotes selected and edited by Prem, while a covert audio recording from inside Club Heros in 2015 plays through headphones. It sounds like it’s been recorded in a sock, because it has. “I was probably just wearing a jockstrap,” explains Prem.


The tinny din of trash anthems – from a club mix of Mylo’s Doctor Pressure (2004) to Armand Van Helden’s My My My (2005) – play at intervals, amongst the squeals of creaking doors and distorted conversations. The footnotes include cited quotations, mundane or highly personal diaristic entries from Prem, and even old excerpts from a blog attempting to counter the proposed local developments.
In one footnote, as the sound of a flowing sink plays overhead, Prem writes: “I wonder how many dicks have been washed in that tiny sink, and how many dicks caused splashes of dick water to land on their neighbours hands as they were being washed…” Later, various definitions of embodiment – the idea that all perception is influenced by our body’s physical interactions – are explored, including Sara Ahmed’s theory of “orientation”, which argues that the sometimes disorientating way queer people experience a straight world (restaurants filled with tables of two-person heterosexual couples, for example) can be creatively productive. In this way, Prem sees places like The Backstreet as a way of reorienting queer bodies.


Notably, Prem’s footnotes eschew traditional archiving processes, offering a messy account of their Backstreet experiences, peppered with everything from their thoughts revisiting the Backstreet post closure in December 2024, as well as meandering realisations that highlight how an experience could differ for anyone who walked through the doors of the bar. At one point, they mention a visit to a formal attire fetish night called Gentlemen. “That night, I ended up wearing the same suit I wore to dad’s funeral,” they write. “I found a napkin folded in one of the pockets. It must have come from the langar [a community kitchen] at the gurdwara.”
It’s an intriguing approach, one that doesn’t so much fetishise this fetish archive, but instead complicates it, refusing master narratives that present queer history through the dominant, white and cis-gendered narrative. As Prem observes, this was a men’s‑only club. “I’m not part of the leather scene, for instance; I’m also non-binary,” they say. “I still used that space, and I still found comfort and community in that space.”
As such, Prem’s internal monologues in the footnotes also highlight the realities – not specific to The Backstreet, but to a reality in many gay spaces – that come with being a particular gender or race. The P‑slur, for example, features in a quote from one “friendly” patron Prem overhead at the bar.
Elsewhere in the footnotes, Prem learns that Mark Duggan’s cousin was murdered in the club above The Backstreet in 2011, and down the road at Tower Hamlets Cemetery, an infamous cruising spot, a suspected homophobic murder occurred in 2021. That Prem draws all of this from one hallowed leather haunt is a testament to their MO: by homing in on niche, specific sites of queer subculture, richer discoveries emerge.
A psychogeography, if you will, Documents of a recent past might mark the end of one tale, but it’s given way to plenty more. In fact, at the bar’s auction, Prem also picked up the club’s front doors, outdoor heaters and a metal basket full of dog toys used in pup play, which – they allude – will provide material for more work. The Backstreet’s lore continues.
Documents of a recent past is showing at Studio Voltaire until 15th March
