The Coleherne Arms 1866 was a gay pub in west London at 261 Old Brompton Road, Earl’s Court. From the 1950s it was a well-known music venue; through the 1970s and 1980s it was a landmark leather bar. In 2008 it was rebranded as a gastropub, The Pembroke. For leather and BDSM history the Coleherne is London’s classic clone-and-leather room—blacked-out windows, hanky code, international tourist draw—and also a site of police harassment, GLF-era conflict, and, later, serial-killer notoriety that still shadows its legend.
Bohemian beginnings and Sunday music sessions
Named after the Coleherne family, the pub began in 1866 at 261 Old Brompton Road and long attracted a bohemian clientele before it was known as a gay bar. Lifelong Earl’s Court Square resident Jennifer Ware recalled being taken there for Sunday lunch in the 1930s; after lunch, drag entertainers performed. For more than three decades the Coleherne was celebrated for Sunday lunchtime music sessions that cut across race, class, age, and sexual orientation in a way unique in London. Traditional jazz in the mid-1950s gave way to modern jazz; the seal was set in 1962 when pianist Russell Henderson arrived with two young Trinidadian students to play calypso-flavoured Latin jazz. Henderson formed a regular trio with Stirling Betancourt on timbales and a succession of double-bassists, built a Caribbean-oriented atmosphere, and instituted one of London’s most popular jam sessions. He also played solo piano on weekend evenings. For the next thirty-five years the Coleherne was a magnet for musicians hunting a jam—much to the delight of brewers Bass Charrington.
The 1969 Guide to London Pubs described how the house really came into its own as a musical pub on Sunday mornings with a dynamic West Indian band. The rhythmic mix included percussionists such as Errol Phillip ("Blocker") and double-bassists Brylo Ford, Irving Clement, and David "Happy" Williams, later Clyde Davies on electric bass. International jazz figures—Johnny Griffin, Walter Davis Jr., Philly Joe Jones—joined locals including Eric Allandale, Graham Bond, Dave DeFries, Malcolm Griffiths, Rannie Hart, Joe Harriott, Shake Keane, Mike Osborne, Terri Quaye, Ernest Ranglin, John Surman, and Olaf Vass. In the 1970s virtuoso folk guitarist Davey Graham was a regular. Audiences included rock and pop musicians such as Eric Burdon, Georgie Fame, and Mick Jagger; actors Norman Beaton, Ram John Holder, Danny "Pressure" Jackson, Horace James, and Bari Jonson; poets Pete Brown and Michael Horovitz; publisher Peter Owen; and calypsonian Lord Kitchener. In 1966 Henderson, Betancourt, and Max Cherrie were recruited from the Coleherne to play steel drums for a children’s event organised by social worker Rhaune Laslett that evolved into the first Notting Hill Carnival. In 1973 the Sunday sessions were the subject of a BBC Two Full House documentary directed by Horace Ové and transmitted on 3 February 1973. That music history is not a side note: the same address that later meant leather internationally was first a rare London room where Caribbean jazz, white rock stars, and gay and straight drinkers shared Sunday air.
Gay pub, leather bar, and the "Cloneherne"
The Coleherne became a gay pub in the mid-1950s. Originally it was segregated into two bars—one for the straight crowd, one for the gay community—at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. In the 1970s it became a notorious leather bar with blacked-out windows, drawing an international crowd that included Freddie Mercury, Kenny Everett, Mike Procter, Anthony Perkins, Rupert Everett, Ian McKellen, and Derek Jarman. Leather men in chaps and jackets, with key chains and colour-coded handkerchiefs, filled the room—justifying the nickname "The Cloneherne." It was known internationally as a leather bar by 1965. The gay community flourished in Earl’s Court and international tourists joined locals. A mid-1990s makeover tried to lighten the image and widen the clientele but failed to reverse decline. In September 2008 Realpubs bought the house, refurbished it heavily, and reopened it as gastropub The Pembroke. Before that reopening the Coleherne was reputed to be London’s oldest gay pub; the title then passed to the King Edward VI in Islington (closed 2011), then the Queen’s Head in Chelsea (closed 2016). The Markham Arms at 138 King’s Road, closed in the early 1990s and now a bank branch, had been a gay pub on Saturdays only.
GLF clash, police harassment, and serial killers
In 1972 Coleherne pub-goers angry at the politicisation of gay sex and lifestyle by the Gay Liberation Front pelted passing Pride parade-goers with bottles. Over the years police made many arrests outside at closing time for obstruction, soliciting, importuning, and the more serious charge of conspiracy to corrupt public morals—often for little more than gay men standing in the street talking, while similar post-closing crowds at non-gay pubs nearby drew no action. Street disturbances and demonstrations in the 1970s and 1980s answered decades of that harassment. In its later years the pub was infamous as the stalking ground for three separate serial killers from the 1970s to the 1990s: Dennis Nilsen, Michael Lupo, and Colin Ireland. Ireland killed five men in 1993 after resolving at New Year to become a serial killer. Though he later claimed to be straight, he picked up men at the Coleherne whose colour-coded handkerchiefs signalled interest in sadomasochism and a passive role, went home with them, restrained them, and murdered them. That history is part of why the Coleherne’s leather legend is double-edged: hanky-code cruising as community signal and, in a handful of catastrophic cases, as a map predators could read.
Popular culture and lasting leather memory
American author Armistead Maupin worked the Coleherne into Babycakes in his Tales of the City cycle: a character leaves as a clock strikes ten, walks past high-windowed brick buildings to a gay pub called the Coleherne, finds the leather boys, orders gin and tonic, reads bulletin-board notices about Gay Tory meetings and jumble sales for deaf lesbians, and meets a young man across the horseshoe bar. The Stranglers’ song "Hanging Around" on debut album Rattus Norvegicus name-checks the room: moving in the Coleherne with the leather all around, sweat getting steamy, eyes on the ground, hanging around. For BDSMWild readers the Coleherne is London leather geography in one address—Sunday Caribbean jazz that fed Notting Hill Carnival, mid-century illegal gay back bar, 1970s international leather clone palace, police hostility, GLF-era street fights, serial-killer infamy, Maupin fiction, Stranglers lyrics, and a 2008 gastropub erasure. The Pembroke’s menus do not cancel what the blacked-out windows meant: chaps, hankies, keys, and a global reputation that made Earl’s Court a pilgrimage stop for men who wanted SM-coded leather company before apps existed to replace the bar door.
