Old Places, New Stories

Queer lives don’t only unfold in cities or capitals — they are everywhere, in suburbs, archives, domestic spaces and inherited stories that refuse to stay neatly contained. Join three acclaimed researchers/writers as they map queer experience across the everyday and the overlooked.

John Grindrod’s Tales of the Suburbs, is a vivid and often surprising history of LGBTQ+ life beyond the city, tracing chosen families, hidden networks and queer resilience in ordinary places. Diarmud Hester’s Nothing Ever Just Disappears is a lyrical exploration of how queer lives are shaped by the spaces they inhabit, from Paris to Cambridge to Dungeness, and Michael Hall threads together memory, legacy and identity to ask what we carry forward from those who came before us, A Queer Inheritance, as he explores alternative (and fabulous) histories in the National Trust.

Chaired by Martin Dines, whose work on queer culture and space has helped shape contemporary thinking about LGBTQ+ histories, this session asks how place, memory and inheritance continue to shape queer life today.

3-Day Festival and Sunday Pass holders: This event is free to attend with your pass, but advance registration is required as places are limited. Please book a Pass Holder Free Registration ticket to reserve your place. Without a reservation, we cannot guarantee entry.

John Grindrod is a social historian of modern places. He’s the author of Tales of the Suburbs: LGBTQ+ Lives Behind Net Curtains, Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain (2022), Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt (shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize, 2017) and Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain (2013). He hosts the podcast Monstrosities Mon Amour, about loving the places other people hate

Diarmuid Hester is a cultural historian of gender and sexuality, and the author of Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper and Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories. He is a BBC New Generation Thinker, the creator of Prick Up Your Ears audio journeys, and the co-founder of Club Urania. Until 2021, he was a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where he now curates the Creative Careers Festival. Diarmuid’s new book, The Invention of Man: or, Modern Masculinity and How to Remake It will be published by Hamish Hamilton/Penguin in 2027.

Michael Hall has published several books on architecture, country houses and collecting, including Waddesdon Manor: The Biography of a Rothschild House, George Frederick Bodley and the Later Gothic Revival in Britain and America and Art, Passion and Power: The Story of the Royal Collection. A former Architectural Editor of Country Life and Editor of Apollo, he was Editor of The Burlington Magazine from 2017 to 2024.

Martin Dines is a writer, researcher and teacher. He is an associate professor at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, where he lectures in English literature and creative writing. Much of Martin’s research — including his most recent book, The Literature of Suburban Change, published by Edinburgh University Press — focuses on literary engagements with cities and suburbs, and British and American queer writing from the 1950s to the present. Most recently he has been exploring what might emerge from our reading literary material together ‘on location’, including at sites dominated by transport infrastructure. In 2026 he was appointed writer in residence for the Chessington branch line in southwest London. Martin lives in Brighton.