What is the place of a leatherman in a city with no leather scene? For this marginal subculture, the closure of The Backstreet in 2022 represents an erasure of identity from London’s urban politics. This project enacts the bar’s closure, alongside a trend of closing LGBTQ+ nightlife venues, as a form of future looking to create a site of permanent sexual citizenship for London’s leather and fetish counter public.

Built upon the layers of coded meaning in the semiotics of the leather subculture, the architecture is imbued with forgotten queer narratives. The proposal becomes an act of ‘intergenerational re-remembering and a rejection of sanitised, cosmopolitan modalities of queer culture.

In reframing non-normative sexualised spaces as a point of political heritage, the building embodies a hypersexualised, hypermasculine aesthetic. An architecture of sleaze, defiantly empowering a highly stigmatised and pathologised counter public.