Raymond Revuebar

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The Raymond Revuebar was a striptease and adult entertainment club at 11 Walker's Court, Soho, London, open from 1958 to 2004. Founded by impresario Paul Raymond, it was the first establishment in Britain to stage nude performance legally and continuously, and for four decades was one of the defining institutions of Soho's adult entertainment economy. After its closure the building was repurposed as a gay nightclub, placing it within the broader story of Soho's gradual transformation into London's LGBT+ social centre.

Paul Raymond

The Revuebar was the creation of Geoffrey Anthony Quinn (15 November 1925 – 2 March 2008), who adopted the stage name Paul Raymond while working as a touring mind-reader and variety performer in the 1940s. Born in Liverpool and raised largely by his mother after his father left the family, Raymond left school at fifteen and worked a series of jobs – including office boy on the Manchester Ship Canal and RAF bandsman during National Service – before gravitating towards showbusiness.

By the mid-1950s he was touring nude revue shows under the fiction that the performers were living statues, a device used to navigate the Lord Chamberlain's Office restrictions on nudity onstage. Recognising the commercial potential of a permanent London venue, he sold his house and car to fund the conversion of the former Doric Ballroom at Walker's Court into a private members' club, which opened on 21 April 1958.

History of the Revuebar

Operating as a members' club allowed the Revuebar to sidestep the Lord Chamberlain's restrictions on nudity that applied to public performances. Within two years it had accumulated 45,000 members. Raymond purchased the freehold of the Walker's Court property for £14,000 not long after opening.

The club was not without legal difficulty. In 1961 Raymond was fined £5,000 after the London Sessions described the entertainment as "filthy, disgusting and beastly" – a ruling prompted by acts that included allowing audience members to ring a bell attached to a performer and an onstage snake-charming routine. The prosecution did little lasting damage: Raymond continued to build the venue into one of central London's best-known attractions. By 1967 it had moved entirely to striptease and was running up to three performances an evening.

The Revuebar appeared in the Beatles' television film Magical Mystery Tour (1967) and was used as a location in the 1986 film Mona Lisa.

The adjacent Boulevard Theatre, also operated by Raymond, hosted a very different kind of entertainment from 1980 to 1981, when it became home to The Comic Strip, a comedy club co-founded by Peter Richardson. Its resident performers included Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Nigel Planer, and Alexei Sayle. Eddie Izzard also performed at the Boulevard in 1989.

By the 1990s the Revuebar was facing competition from table-dancing venues such as Spearmint Rhino and Stringfellow's, and audience numbers fell. In 1997 Gérard Simi purchased the trading name and operational control of the club, though not the property. The Revuebar closed on 10 June 2004 when its operating company went into administration.

Paul Raymond's property empire

From the 1970s onwards Raymond invested his profits in Soho property on a large scale. Operating through Soho Estates, he bought approximately 400 freeholds across the district – reportedly acquiring one per week during 1977, a period of police raids and closures that drove down property values. He also acquired properties in Chelsea, Kensington and Hampstead. By the early 1990s he was estimated to be the wealthiest individual in the United Kingdom, with a fortune variously put at £650 million and upwards.

His personal life was marked by the death of his daughter Debbie on 5 November 1992 from an accidental heroin overdose, after which he became largely reclusive. He died on 2 March 2008, aged 82, from prostate cancer and respiratory failure. His granddaughters Fawn James and India Rose subsequently appeared on UK wealth lists as inheritors of the Soho Estates portfolio.

Raymond's life was dramatised in the 2013 film The Look of Love, directed by Michael Winterbottom, with Steve Coogan playing Raymond, Anna Friel as his wife Jean, and Imogen Poots as Debbie.

After closure: gay nightclub era

Following the Revuebar's closure in 2004, the Walker's Court building was taken over by entrepreneurs Paul Richardson and Mark Pearce, who opened it in September 2004 as Too 2 Much, a gay nightclub and cabaret venue. The transformation was designed by architect Steve Jensen, and the cocktail menu was created by Nick Drewery of Milk & Honey. The comedian Graham Norton contributed the house rules. The venue was positioned at the luxury end of the Soho gay scene, combining evening cabaret and theatre with late-night club programming.

In November 2006 it was renamed the Soho Revue Bar and continued as an LGBT+ venue hosting events including Trannyshack club nights. It closed on 29 January 2009.

In February 2011 the building reopened as The Box Soho, a cabaret and nightclub venue, under the management of American impresario Simon Hammerstein.

Significance

The arc of Walker's Court – from Paul Raymond's 1958 members' club, through the 2004 gay nightclub conversion, to its subsequent uses – encapsulates the transformation of Soho across six decades, from the era of censorship and the Lord Chamberlain's restrictions, through the AIDS crisis and the emergence of a confident LGBT+ quarter, to the gentrification and diversification of the neighbourhood in the twenty-first century.

See also

• Too 2 Much
• Shadow Lounge
• Soho
• Timeline of London Bars and Clubs