Drag queens, secret votes, and the £4m battle for Bethnal Green Working Men's Club
An in-depth London Centric investigation. Plus: A discounted penthouse flat at St Pancras; the person dragged by an Overground train with their fingers stuck in the door.
When I was threatened with being reported to the police during a conversation on a doorstep, I knew something very strange was going on at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club.
I’d come to the house of Steve Smorthit, the club secretary, to get some answers about the future of the famous east London venue. The woman who answered the door wasn’t in the mood to chat. Instead, she told me she was calling the authorities and said “you can write what you want” as she closed the door in my face. Afterwards, a note was circulated to members accusing me of harassment and warning everyone to avoid talking to me, at the risk of jeopardising the club’s multi-million pound sale.
If you’re one of the tens of millions of people globally who watched Netflix’s Baby Reindeer, you’ll have seen inside Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, as Richard Gadd’s character struggles through a stand-up routine on its wood-panelled stage. Or perhaps you’re one of the thousands of Londoners (including me) who has enjoyed nights out there over the last two decades, as it became an unexpected addition to London’s club scene under the leadership of promoters Warren Dent and Charlotte West-Williams. It’s also possible you only know it from the recent press coverage of the club’s abrupt closure in July, which prompted a protest of drag queens on its steps as London looked set to lose yet another late-night, queer-friendly space.
On the surface it looks like an increasingly-common London story of a greedy landlord evicting a much-loved community venue. Yet the building is not owned by a faceless corporate property speculator. It’s in the possession of an old-school members-only organisation consisting of people who, in some cases, still live just yards from the club’s front door. And the more I dug into it, the stranger the story became.
A months-long London Centric investigation into the closure of Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club has found allegations of false declarations to the financial regulator, legal threats sent from the office of a major US law firm, and an increasingly toxic fight over who should control a building estimated to be worth £4 million in one of London’s increasingly gentrified neighbourhoods.
It’s a tale that involves a tight-knit group of old East Enders, many of them related, who stand to receive as much as £80,000 each if they succeed in shutting down a venue that has has become a cornerstone of the capital’s queer community.
And it poses two important questions: who are the guardians of London’s cultural venues? And who are the real representatives of the capital’s working class in 2024?
London Centric subscribers can read on for the full details.
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London Centric’s exclusive on London hospitals charging £2/hour for wheelchair rentals attracted millions of views on social media. In a sign of the story’s appeal across the political spectrum it was followed-up in the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and also the Morning Star.
A London Overground passenger was dragged 60 metres along a railway platform at up to 11mph after attempting to board a train as it was getting ready to depart. The individual shoved their hand into the closing doors at Enfield Town station but their fingers weren’t fat enough to alert the driver.
A new investigation into the incident, which took place in July, contains this warning for anyone travelling around London who is tempted to stop train doors as they close: “Objects which are thinner than 30mm, such as fingers, walking sticks or objects that are not rigid in nature (such as coats) will not necessarily be detected by the system”.
London property reduction of the week: Another £1m has been cut off the price of a penthouse in the St Pancras water tower, originally listed at £11.5m. It’s now a bargain at £8.5m.
London property bargain of the week: £300,000 for a three-bed cannabis farm in Finchley.
London Centric investigates: The battle for Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club
Bernie Martin Junior was delighted when I called him about the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. The former bus driver-turned-childminder had moved out of the area years ago but immediately began reminiscing about how his family would gather at the club in the 1980s, bringing in Chinese takeaways for lazy Sunday afternoons while the parents had a drink and played pool in the bar.
“It was the original East Enders,” he said. “It was just like a home-from-home. You’d turn up and have a giggle. Everyone went with family there. Me and my dad, my sisters, nieces and nephews. There was a pool room downstairs and they’d be downstairs playing darts and popping up to get another drink. We had lots of party nights.”
But I hadn’t phoned Bernie Martin Junior just to hear about his time at the club.
According to the most recent accounts filed with the Financial Conduct Authority and signed by club secretary Steve Smorthit, Bernie Martin Junior is one of the two registered trustees of the “Boro’ of Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club”. This legal entity has recently voted to evict the venue’s current occupants, sell the building, and split the proceeds between the remaining few dozen members. I wanted to ask why the trustees were selling a popular community asset in the face of opposition from many of its existing users.
But Bernie Martin Junior was baffled by my question. He said he had not been to the club in years, was no longer a member, and had no idea that, according to the latest accounts, he was registered with a financial regulator as the legal trustee of an organisation with assets worth millions of pounds.
“I’m one of the trustees!” Martin shouted to his daughter in the background, laughing at the idea. “That’s complete news to me. Had no idea. It will be funny when I tell my sister later. I don’t know how I’d even go around working out how I was put down as a trustee, because I’ve never been told.”
Then he had a brainwave: His father Bernie Martin Senior, who “lived for the club”, had remained a trustee until his death in 2020. Bernie Martin Junior proposed a theory: When his father died, someone had added the word ‘junior’ to the old paperwork. “It just saved having to do a load of legal declarations. If they file it under Bernie, it’s still Bernie!”
The club committee declined to comment on Bernie’s theory, and we haven’t been able to verify it either way. But London Centric has uncovered other examples of unusual approaches to management practices at the club, including six years of missing financial returns, allegations of a curious influx of new members prior to a crucial vote, and a series of legal battles that have implications for similar venues across the capital.
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