Stories Community
Published: 1 June 2026 by Matthew Belfield
In a small Cheshire town, a hidden pub helped me find friendship, community and a sense of belonging I didn’t know I needed.
I grew up in South Cheshire in the 90s and early 00s, where queer life didn’t always have a place — or a name. I spent the first 18 years of my life in Congleton, then the next 10 in Crewe.
I came out as bisexual at 18 to a small group of close friends. Around the same time, my parents separated and I moved to Crewe. In that move, I lost the support network I’d built. Everything felt uncertain again.
There weren’t really any visible spaces for LGBTQ+ people then. The town was working-class, pretty right-leaning, and while people could be kind, there wasn’t always understanding. Being queer was something you kept quiet.
This was before dating or hookup apps. If you wanted to meet people like you, you had to go out and find them — or recognise something of yourself in someone else.
I remember being outed while working at Tesco. It spread quickly — people shocked, some openly disgusted. One day, I came into work out of uniform and someone joked, “Is it come to work dressed as a faggot day, Matt?”
You carry moments like that. They make you smaller. More guarded.
Around that time, I reconnected with someone from school who was also living in Crewe. They told me about a place — a pub called The Park.
From the outside, it looked like any small-town pub. Nothing remarkable. Easy to miss.
But through a curtain at the back, it was something else entirely. A makeshift show bar. Camp music, coloured lights, a drag queen in a slightly-too-big wig and sequin dress and dodgy make-up. It wasn’t polished. But it was magical.
And it was full of characters. People like Sylvia Trash — the first drag queen I ever met — and Auntie Maureen, the first trans woman I ever met. People completely themselves in ways I hadn’t seen before.
You stepped through and something shifted.
Your shoulders dropped. You stopped scanning the room. You could laugh — properly laugh. You could talk about your life, who you fancied, the future.
What I found wasn’t anything grand. It was friendship — the kind you don’t expect to find in a place you didn’t know existed.
Colleagues from Tesco started appearing too — people who weren’t out either. There was a quiet understanding between us. Conversations that stayed between us.
Queer people have a way of finding each other, even like that. The Park became an anchor — a starting point. Because what began there didn’t stay there.
As those friendships grew, so did our world. We started travelling to Stoke-on-Trent, to a club called The Club.
You’d queue outside with so many other queer people, the line wrapping around the block — something you didn’t see every day. There was anticipation in it.
Then the doors would open.
You’d be hit with heat and sound — music filling the space, bodies moving together. It was electric. Inside, you started to recognise the same faces, week after week. Everyone seemed to know each other — or quickly came to. Even in a crowded room, there was a sense of familiarity.
That’s where things opened up — relationships, first heartbreaks. We even saw early performances from artists like Divina De Campo, long before she hit the big time.
But those spaces didn’t just give us nights out. They led to everything that came after. Trips to the seaside. Days out at the zoo. Sleepovers, gaming nights. Standing beside each other at weddings, growing older together, building lives far beyond those nights out.
The Park and The Club weren’t just places to go. They were where things began.
The Park isn’t there anymore. Neither is The Club. Both spaces are gone — and their loss was felt deeply by the people who found something in them.
They weren’t just venues. They held friendships, first loves, heartbreak — and a kind of joy you only recognise once it’s shaped you.
But what they gave us didn’t leave with them.
I still recognise that feeling now — finding your people, often where you least expect it.
Because queer people find each other. We always have. In small rooms, behind curtains, on crowded dancefloors — and in the lives we build afterwards.
That’s where it began for me. That’s where hope started.
In the places you don’t expect, we find each other anyway.
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