Trocadero

The Trocadero at Piccadilly Circus has occupied the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Coventry Street since the 1880s, operating successively as a music hall annexe, a grand Edwardian restaurant, a tourist entertainment complex, and a nightlife venue. Its LGBT history runs from the Victorian promenade era through to the final years of DTPM in the 2000s.

The original Trocadero Restaurant opened in 1896, built on the site of the former Argyll Rooms. It was a large, fashionable dining establishment that formed part of the social geography of Piccadilly – alongside the Criterion Restaurant to the south, the London Pavilion to the northeast, and the Lilypond further along Coventry Street – that gay men navigated as a connected circuit from at least the early twentieth century.

The Trocadero was referenced in Matt Houlbrook's Queer London (2005) as one of the venues in this circuit during the 1950s, when Piccadilly Circus became the centre of queer commercial sociability in the West End. Its proximity to the Dilly – the gathering place for Dilly boys at the Shaftesbury Memorial fountain – made it part of a landscape that required no map for those who needed it.

The restaurant closed and the building was redeveloped in the 1980s as an entertainment complex, housing Segaworld and other tourist attractions. In its later incarnation it became a nightlife venue, and served as the final home of DTPM, one of London's most celebrated Sunday club nights.