Part of the Gay London Guide — bars, events & things to do.
London, London
Classic two-floor gay pub on Old Compton Street in Soho.
Comptons is a Soho institution, a gay pub on Old Compton Street that's been at the center of London's gay village since 1986. It occupies a handsome building that opened as the Swiss Hotel in 1890 and later traded as the Swiss Tavern, where, in 1953, Dylan Thomas reportedly left the manuscript of Under Milk Wood behind. The venue calls itself the "Grande Dame of Old Compton Street," and the traditional British boozer character is the whole point: a ground-floor horseshoe bar and an upstairs lounge, pints over cocktails, and crowds that spill onto the pavement on a warm night. The regulars skew to a mixed, mature gay-male base plus the steady stream of visitors Soho pulls in, and the mood is no-fuss rather than clubby. Now part of the Stonegate group, it remains one of the easiest first stops on a night out in the gay village: central, unpretentious, and genuinely historic.
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