Lilypond

The Lilypond was the nickname given by staff and regulars to the first-floor restaurant of the Lyons Corner House on Coventry Street, just off Piccadilly Circus. From the 1930s it became one of the most important gay meeting places in London – not despite being a brightly lit, respectable chain tea room, but because of it.

J. Lyons & Co. opened their Coventry Street Corner House in 1909. It operated on several floors, serving thousands of meals a day at prices a clerk or factory worker could afford. The first-floor restaurant was large, busy, and anonymous in the way that only very public places can be. Gay men discovered that this combination – respectability, crowds, no alcohol licence to threaten – made it considerably safer than a pub or club. Regulars gravitated to one corner of the room. Staff recognised the pattern and, according to later accounts, quietly ensured that other diners were not seated in the immediate vicinity.

The name Lilypond reflected the camp sensibility of its regulars – a nod, perhaps, to the flowery language of the underground queer world, the polari spoken in corners and on stages across the West End. It sat naturally alongside the nearby Criterion Restaurant's nickname, the Bargain Basement, and the London Pavilion's promenade: a network of tolerated spaces in a city that officially offered none.

The Metropolitan Police were aware of the Lilypond but, as with the Dilly outside, found the logic of a busy public space difficult to work against. Arrests in a crowded tea room required evidence and witnesses that a pub raid did not. The Lilypond endured.

The Coventry Street Corner House closed in 1970. The building was subsequently redeveloped; the site is now occupied by a Vue Cinema and retail units. The corner of floor where those men met for forty years is somewhere beneath the current concession stand.