Not a guidebook, but a beginning: a map drawn with care.

The Map You Draw With Your Body

We don’t arrive in a new city with a map in our hands. Not really. What we carry instead are fragments: a few addresses scribbled on a note, the memory of a friend’s recommendation, a poster seen in passing. We make sense of the city as we move through it, step by step, corner by corner, until one day, the street we once stumbled into becomes a street we return to. A place becomes a reference point. A door, a rhythm. A pulse.

When I first landed in London, I wasn’t sure where to start. The world felt large, cold in parts, and full of unknowable things. But I also knew I was here to feel, something, anything. And so I followed that feeling. I wandered. I lingered. I began to draw what I now call my own queer map of London. Not a complete map. Not a guidebook. Just a trace of the places where something shifted in me. Where I felt less alone. Where queerness, suddenly, had shape and space and light.

Here are four such places — safe, warm, full of life. And maybe, just maybe, a place where your own map might begin too.

1st Stop: Dalston Superstore

Glittered Histories, Two Floors of Joy

Dalston Superstore wasn’t the first queer venue I ever walked into, but it was the first that made me want to stay longer than I needed to. From the outside, it looks like many East London bars; neon sign, unassuming door, a couple of people smoking just beyond the threshold. But inside, it unfurls into something more layered, more committed: a space that doesn’t just host queer nights, it builds queer community, week after week, year after year.

Superstore has been holding its corner in Dalston for over a decade, becoming a kind of landmark — not for tourists, but for those of us looking for something familiar and alive. Beyond the drag shows and DJ sets, it’s a space that takes care: offering trans-inclusive policies, safer space practices, and even free daytime block parties that spill out onto the pavement like a promise. It's not trying to be perfect, but it is trying to be better, for the people who call it theirs.

Inside, the two floors hum with very different energies. Upstairs is the heart of a classic queer bar — chatty, luminous, often blasting pop music from Kylie to Kim Petras, with strangers striking up conversations that start with “I love your earrings.” Downstairs is darker, sonically and emotionally: the music shifts into serious electronic territory, with house, techno, breaks, and ballroom all weaving into sets that remember queer music as a form of resistance, ritual, and futurity. It’s not just about dancing, it’s about vibrating at the frequency of those who came before us.

My first night there, I didn’t know anyone. But I didn’t feel like a stranger. That’s what makes places like Superstore matter, not just for what they host, but for what they hold. And when you’ve just arrived in a new city, not knowing where to begin, that sense of being held — even briefly — can mean everything.

2nd Stop: The Common Press Bookstore

Paper, Resistance, and Belonging

Some places speak in loud music and stage lights. Others speak in paper, in underlined passages, in the hush that falls between two people reading side by side. The Common Press is that kind of place — a queer bookstore tucked behind a community café on Bethnal Green Road, where books are shelved not by genre but by gesture, by urgency, by care.

I first wandered in on a rainy afternoon. The air was thick with that peculiar smell of paper and espresso, and somewhere in the back, someone was softly laughing at a poem. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. But as I moved between the shelves, I found books I had spent years trying to find back home — zines on trans embodiment, essays on queer migration, bilingual poetry collections by diasporic voices I’d never seen in print before. These weren’t just books. They were evidence.

The Common Press isn’t large, and it isn’t loud. But it radiates. The way the staff talk about the books, the way the events are programmed — there’s always something brewing: a reading group on queer intimacy, a fundraiser for trans healthcare, a film screening, a poetry open mic. And even when there’s nothing officially happening, the space itself holds you gently, as if to say: “You belong here, even in your quiet.”

Running an independent queer bookstore in London isn’t easy. But The Common Press has carved a space that resists not just economic precarity, but erasure itself. It doesn’t try to do everything. It just does this: offers you a chair, a book, a place to begin again.

That day, I bought only one zine. But I stayed for hours.

 

3rd Stop: Gay’s The Word

A Landmark in Ink and Memory

The first time I stood outside Gay’s The Word, I didn’t go in right away. There was something about the façade — modest yet unwavering, like a sentence carved into time. I lingered by the window, half-reading the titles on display, half-thinking about the people who must have stood here before me — reading, hoping, maybe trembling. In that stillness, I could feel the weight of memory pressing gently against the present.

Founded in 1979, Gay’s The Word is not just the oldest LGBTQ+ bookshop in the UK — it is a monument built from paper, ink, and collective courage. It opened during a time when queer books were often hidden, censored, or criminalized, and within a few years, it was raided by the police under obscenity laws. But the shop survived, not in spite of these attacks, but because of the community that rallied around it. It became a headquarters for political organizing, for AIDS activism, for lesbian and gay youth support groups. If these walls could speak, they would whisper not only the titles of books, but the names of lovers lost, rallies planned, poems read aloud on dark days.

Compared to some newer spaces, Gay’s The Word might appear simple — unassuming wooden shelves, worn carpet, flyers tacked to the bulletin board. But look closer and you’ll see what this simplicity holds: decades of resilience. It’s a space that has outlived trends, survived moral panics, and witnessed the slow unravelling of silence. In an era where so much of queer culture is repackaged for visibility, Gay’s The Word remains quietly, stubbornly committed to community over commodification.

There’s a scene in the film Pride — based on the true story of queer activists supporting striking miners — set inside this very bookstore. And yes, the film was shot here. But more importantly, the story itself unfolded here. This was the meeting point for LGSM (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners), a place where political solidarity was not just imagined, but lived. Standing inside, among the shelves, I felt the echoes of all those who had stood before me, building futures word by word.

I only bought some postcards that day. But I left with a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding — and the quiet certainty that I had stepped into something far larger than myself.

 

4th Stop: Queer Britain

A Home Made Visible

Queer Britain is not a large museum. In fact, the first time I visited, I almost walked past it. Tucked along the side of Granary Square, its glass windows seemed less like a grand institution and more like an open invitation — come in, take a breath, you’re safe here.

But step inside, and something shifts. Queer Britain is the UK’s first national LGBTQ+ museum, and though its footprint is small, its weight is considerable. This is a place built not for spectacle, but for testimony. On its white walls and quiet plinths, you don’t find generalized narratives or romanticized slogans, but fragments — of protest signs, T-shirts, family photographs, letters, lipstick-stained flyers, drag costumes, and uncaptioned lives. It is a museum of what does not usually survive.

There’s something humbling about seeing queer history displayed not as tragedy, not as spectacle, but as a lived, everyday fact. Of course, museums are always shaped by what they can display, and what they can’t. As I walked through the rooms, I thought about the countless stories that hadn’t made it behind the glass: those whispered in clubs, buried in home drawers, passed along in languages not yet archived. Even so, Queer Britain tries. It doesn’t speak for all of us, but it makes space for some of us and reminds us how long we’ve been here.

Sometimes the most radical thing a museum can do is simply to say: this happened, we mattered, we still do.

Mapping Our Way Through

None of these places changed me overnight. But each of them offered a pause, a pivot, a moment to remember that I am not the first to walk these streets with a tender body and unspoken questions. In their own ways, they reminded me that queer living is not just about visibility or survival it is about tracing a line, however faint, through the world and daring to call it home.

These stops on my queer map are not fixed points. They are invitations  to linger, to listen, to ask how we might live otherwise. They taught me that queerness is not always loud or triumphant. Sometimes it’s the hush in a bookstore. The beat downstairs. A hand-scribbled note in a museum guestbook. The small, persistent glow of being among people who don’t need you to explain.

And maybe that’s the beginning of something.

Wherever you are fresh off a plane, three years into your degree, or just passing through — your queer map will look different. That’s the point. Let it emerge slowly, through joy and mistake, through wandering and returning. You don’t have to know where you’re going. You just have to start walking.

    

Next time, I’ll take you with me to revisit a particular afternoon at Queer Britain, when an ESEA-focused exhibition shifted something deep within me. But for now, maybe start your own map. London is vast. But somewhere within it, a corner is already waiting for you to arrive.