# LGBT+ Romford: A Short and Recent History

*Category: The wider town*
*Topics: lgbt+, romford, havering, pride, kaleidoscope, film festival*

This page documents the recent and recorded history of Romford's LGBT+ community, including the first Pride event in 2018, the founding of Kaleidoscope in 2022, and the East London LGBTQ+ Film Festival. The page highlights the lack of documented history before 2018 and the efforts to build a community and create a visible presence in the town. It also mentions the importance of libraries and other public spaces in providing a safe and welcoming environment for LGBT+ individuals.

## Key points

- First Romford Pride event held in 2018
- Kaleidoscope founded in 2022 as Havering's only dedicated LGBTQ+ organisation
- East London LGBTQ+ Film Festival established
- Pride events have been held annually since 2018
- Kaleidoscope extends its services to adults aged 25 and over in 2026

## Content

Romford's LGBT+ history, as a documented public thing, is about eight years
old. That is not because there were no LGBT+ people in Romford before 2018.
It is because almost nothing about their lives here was written down, and a
page that pretended otherwise would be inventing a past to make a better
story.

What can be documented is recent, specific and unusually well recorded: a
first Pride in 2018, a march down the town's main shopping street in 2022, a
festival on the market that has held a royal charter since 1247, and a charity
founded in 2022 that now runs a film festival and a town-wide campaign. This
page covers that.

## The record before 2018

The honest position is that this site has found no documented history of
LGBT+ venues, meeting places or organisations in Romford before the twenty-
first century.

That is a statement about the surviving record, not about the people. Britain's
documented queer geography is heavily concentrated in central London and a few
coastal towns — the places with the density and anonymity that made
semi-public gathering possible, and the historians who later went looking. An
outer market town of Romford's size has no equivalent literature. Historic
England's national survey of places connected to LGBTQ+ history includes
nothing in Havering.

So the modern picture is better described as something built than something
uncovered. If a record does exist — a venue, a group, a newsletter, a
photograph — it is not in the published sources, and it would be worth having.

## 2018: the first Romford Pride

**The first Romford Pride was held in the town centre on 28 July 2018.**
Hundreds attended. It was the first large-scale public LGBT+ event in the
borough's history.

The organisers used it to collect something as well as to celebrate. Attendees
were asked to submit **"My Wishes"** — proposals for improving LGBT+ provision
in Havering, which the organisers intended to act on the following year. A
first Pride that doubles as a consultation exercise tells you what the starting
position was: not a community with existing infrastructure celebrating itself,
but one finding out how many people were there and what they needed.

## 2022: down South Street

Romford Pride returned on **30 July 2022**, and it moved. Rather than a
stationary event, there was a **parade down South Street**, the town's main
commercial artery, which took about forty-five minutes to pass. It included
residents, emergency services, charities and local businesses.

The year matters: 1972 saw the UK's first Pride rally in London, so 2022 was
the fiftieth anniversary, marked across the capital that summer.

Routing a parade through the middle of a suburban shopping street is a
different proposition from holding a festival in a park. It is not optional to
notice, and it takes place among people who did not choose to attend. Romford
Pride was in South Street again on **9 September 2023**.

## 2025: on the market

In **2025 Romford Pride moved to Romford Market**, on Saturday **28 June**,
from noon to 4pm, hosted by Kaleidoscope.

Romford Market has operated under a charter granted by Henry III in **1247**.
It is the oldest continuously functioning thing in the town and the anchor of
its identity. Putting Pride on it is a deliberate piece of staging: the
juxtaposition is the point, and it places the event inside the town's history
rather than alongside it.

Pride has run in Romford every year since, with Kaleidoscope taking it into a
third consecutive year in 2026.

## Kaleidoscope

**Kaleidoscope is Havering's only dedicated LGBTQ+ organisation.** It was
founded in **2022** by **Carrie Kendall and Natalie Keeling**, and it is a
registered charity based in Romford.

It began as a free monthly social club for LGBTQ+ people aged **17 to 24**,
meeting in ordinary places — [the Mercury Mall](/shopping-and-amenities), the
Lumiere cinema — rather than a dedicated venue, which is a choice as much as a
constraint: a group that meets in the shopping centre is visible in a way one
behind its own door is not. That model matters in a suburb. Queer teenagers in
outer London cannot casually reach Soho, and a monthly meet-up within walking
distance of home does work that a scene twelve miles away does not.

In **2026 it extended to adults aged 25 and over**, funded by Havering
Council's **Community Chest**. The organisation states that it welcomes people
of all races, faiths, abilities, sexualities and genders, including straight
and cisgender allies.

Its programming runs well past support groups: storytelling and writing
workshops, zine design, drag karaoke, and group bouldering sessions at a local
climbing centre — putting a queer group into a mainstream leisure space rather
than a separate one.

## The East London LGBTQ+ Film Festival

Kaleidoscope also runs the **East London LGBTQ+ Film Festival**, held at the
**Lumiere Cinema** in Romford — a community co-operative cinema.

The **third** festival ran over **8–9 November 2025**, with features, shorts
and documentaries programmed into two-hour sessions from 11am to 10pm, each
named for a stripe of the rainbow — Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo —
and followed by Q&As with film-makers and performers.

A recurring festival is a different order of thing from an annual Pride. It
implies a programming calendar, submissions, and an audience that will travel.
Romford has one.

## Scope Out

**Scope Out** is Kaleidoscope's five-month project for the over-25s, funded by
the Community Chest and running from early 2026.

Its output is physical: a set of **LGBTQ+ Pride stickers, designed by the
community itself**, to be displayed in shop windows around Romford, with **FAQ
pamphlets produced for local businesses** alongside them. Monthly meet-ups run
in the lead-up to producing them.

The design is the interesting part. Rather than a charity handing out its own
branding, the people the stickers are meant to reassure designed them over
five months. A sticker in a window is a small thing; a sticker a community
made for itself, in a shop that agreed to display it, is a piece of local
infrastructure.

## Havering Libraries

Romford Library — which also holds the borough's local studies and family
history collections — programmes LGBT+ History Month each February, with book
displays built around the national campaign themes, author events and talks.

Libraries are worth singling out because of what they are: free, municipal,
open to anyone, and not a venue anybody has to identify themselves to enter.
For a reader in Romford who is not out, the library is a materially different
proposition from a club night.

## Timeline

| Year | What happened |
| --- | --- |
| 2018 | First Romford Pride, town centre, 28 July |
| 2022 | Kaleidoscope founded; Pride parade down South Street, 30 July |
| 2023 | Pride in South Street, 9 September; first East London LGBTQ+ Film Festival |
| 2025 | Pride at Romford Market, 28 June; third film festival, 8–9 November |
| 2026 | Kaleidoscope extends to over-25s; Scope Out sticker campaign; Pride returns for a third consecutive year |

## What this page does not claim

Three things in the research behind this page were dropped, and one is worth
naming specifically because it is the kind of error that is easy to repeat.

**A police recollection that is not about Romford.** A widely quoted
reflection by the Metropolitan Police's Matt Jukes describes LGBT+ pubs and
clubs "hidden in industrial side streets" in the 1990s, and working alongside
a trans police officer in the mid-1990s. It is a genuine quotation, and it is
about **the east end of Sheffield**, where he began policing — not Romford, and
not outer London. It has been used elsewhere as though it described Havering.
It does not, and it is not evidence about this town.

**The "Wishing Tree".** An account of the 2018 Pride describes an interactive
"Wishing Tree" installation, later exhibited at Romford Library during LGBT
History Month in 2019. The contemporary reporting describes the "My Wishes"
submissions above; the tree and the library exhibition could not be
corroborated, so they are not stated as fact here.

**Anti-microaggression training.** Scope Out's pamphlets have been described
as covering microaggression reduction and hate-crime reporting protocols. The
sourced description is of FAQ pamphlets for businesses. The stronger version
may be accurate, but it is not what the record says.

## Sources

- **Romford Recorder**, [Hundreds gather to celebrate the first Romford Pride](https://romfordrecorder.co.uk/news/hundreds-gather-to-celebrate-the-first-ever-romford-pride-1-5629824) — the 2018 event and the "My Wishes" submissions.
- **Romford Recorder**, [Pride Month: 'Continued fight for equality' 50 years after first UK rally](https://www.romfordrecorder.co.uk/news/20708129.pride-month-continued-fight-equality-50-years-first-uk-rally/) — the 2022 South Street parade and the fiftieth anniversary.
- **Romford Recorder**, [Romford Pride 2025 to take place at Romford Market](https://www.romfordrecorder.co.uk/news/25210057.romford-pride-2025-take-place-romford-market/) — the move to the market.
- **Kaleidoscope**, [kaleidoscoperomford.com](https://www.kaleidoscoperomford.com/) — the charity's founding, age ranges and programme.
- **The Havering Daily**, [Scope Out: Bringing Queer Creativity and Pride to Romford](https://thehaveringdaily.co.uk/2026/01/16/scope-out-bringing-queer-creativity-and-pride-to-romford/) — the sticker campaign, its funding and its scope.
- **East London LGBTQ+ Film Festival** — [festival background](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_London_LGBTQ%2B_Film_Festival) and Kaleidoscope's own listings for the November 2025 programme.
- **Historic England**, [40 places connected to LGBTQ+ history](https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/features/lgbtq-history-of-40-places/) — the national survey, cited above for what it does *not* contain.

Dates and names here were checked against these sources rather than taken from
a single account. Where a claim could not be corroborated it is in the section
above rather than in the narrative.

Related reading: the [history of Romford town centre](/romford-history),
including the market that Pride now uses, and
[Cottons Park](/cottons-park-history).

## Source

- Canonical URL: https://cotleighroad.com/romford-lgbt-history
- Typed record: https://cotleighroad.com/index.json