Live chicks, dyke raves, and true love... our best memories of The Yard
As The Yard is demolished to make way for a shiny new building, theatre-makers, party-throwers, and Exeunt writers share their most vivid memories
The Yard was only ever meant to be a three-month, pop-up theatre: dreamt up by its artistic director Jay Miller, in the summer of 2011 with the help of 50 volunteers he made a gloriously scrappy, effortless cool venue from a disused warehouse in Hackney Wick. But the bubble never did pop – and The Yard became a cornerstone of east London’s cultural life, as both a theatre and a nightclub. 14 years on, it’s fair to say The Yard has outgrown its original ‘temporary’ space – and next year will move into a brand new, state-of-the-art, double-the-size theatre in Hackney Wick.
To make way for the new, we must say goodbye to the old: tomorrow night sees a final farewell party for the existing Yard space before it is demolished. But for many theatre-lovers, bar-flies, and dance-floor regulars, its destruction will be bittersweet – this is a venue full memories. So, we decided to collect a few for posterity…
Jay Miller, founder and artistic director of The Yard
My most vivid Yard memory is knocking together two bits of scaffolding together to make a bench for people to sit on in the bar as people were arriving for our Grand Opening on 27 July 2011. It was sunny. There’s something about us making the space in front of a growing throng of people waiting to enter the space which feels resonant. We were all so tired from building, so dusty, so excited, so beautifully naive.
James Fritz, playwright
Theatre bars are crap. They just are. But The Yard’s isn’t. It never has been. It’s a fucking miracle of a place.
The concrete floor that runs continuous from stage to dancefloor. The bumping your head on the bottom of the theatre when you sit on the tables at the end. The beautiful grime and graffiti of the loos. The giant smoking table outside where the real party always is. The fact it opens properly late, and always has done.
I worked on that bar for 18 months or so from the summer of 2013, when it still had a mechanical shutter/butcher’s flap combo instead of a door, and a sound system that was comically big for its size. It’s where I've had some of my best nights. It’s where, after a long shift and a stolen bottle of brandy, I first got off with the love of my life. It’s where, years later, I rewrote scenes while The Flea was teching next door, before celebrating making the show long into the night. The beers are always good, the club nights electric, the music excellent.
It's one of the best bars in London, and it just happens to have my favourite theatre in the world attached to it. As much as I love the auditorium – and I do, god, what a venue it has been – it’s the bar that I’m most going to miss.
Alex Uzoka, actor and former member of The Yard’s young company
When I think about The Yard, I think about what it represents to me: a space where anything can exist. And I can’t say that without bringing up my experience in the Queen’s Yard Theatre Company doing Really Real Teenz! When I first started I honestly was like ‘what the fuck is this. Why is someone fingering a raw fish with a pair of scissors and why am I burying that fishes head in basmati rice.’ But once I started opening myself up to the notion that theatre is expression and therefore it can literally be anything, I felt a freedom I had never felt before.
It was so pivotal for me, being 18 years old at the time, to feel true liberty, especially considering life as a young person can be so oppressive. And I think every member in the company felt that freedom too. Maybe a bit too much to be honest… There was a section in the play where some high energy music is bellowing out and we all dance like crazy for four minutes straight. So, of course, a lot of head banging is to be expected. However, one of the members of the company took the headbanging a little too far and full force headbanged into The Yard’s infamous concrete floor. Instantly, their face doubled in size due to the swelling. The mad thing was, they still powered on through till the end of the show. And they still turned up to do all the following shows and gave absolutely everything to each show.
They did so because we were a company. Because we were part of a community. And we were committed to telling that community our story. I feel that – community – encapsulates the spirit of The Yard. Whatever the obstruction, when community is in mind, The Yard always find a way to make it work. Even if you have a swollen face.
Andrzej Lukowski, theatre critic
My first and most enduring memory of The Yard came in the September of 2011, a couple of months after it first opened. I was there to review a show called Manga Sister, which was a 40-minute opera by a company called Liveartshow about an old guy being treated abusively in a care home, whose subconscious somehow manifests a female samurai to dispatch his abusive carers with cold steel. It was almost unbelievable that it existed, let alone that somewhere had actually programmed it, and the evening was made all the more surreal by 1) the fact The Yard had cheerily let me in the night before press night, totally unbothered by the fact they’d only sold about five tickets that evening, meaning I watched this in a near-deserted theatre 2) I discovered upon arrival that my favourite band of all time REM had split up, something I was very much processing while trying to manifest some sort of critical analysis of the whole samurai care home thing.
Do I blame The Yard for splitting REM up? I mean not directly, but it was a powerfully surreal night. To be honest I was just bowled over by how mad the entire situation was, and while I wouldn’t say The Yard replaced REM in my affections, the night was simply too memorable for me to not fall in love with the place. I’ve definitely seen ‘better’ work there since, but when I myself am an old man in a lower-tier care home, I will think back on that evening with wonder.
Vinay Patel, playwright
I’m eight. My grandmother’s wondering what happened to her kitchen foil. I’ve stolen it to make a wobbly spaceship for a play I’ll present at school.
It’s tomorrow. My spaceship takes too long to put up. The play goes unperformed.
I’m 25. Watching The Cherry Orchard. This play’s going over my head though wait the servant gets locked in and just dies what the fuck?
I’m 31. Working on a sci-fi show known for wobbly sets. I pitch a story. About home, loss, legacy, yearning for new worlds. Like The Cherry Orchard? But on a spaceship. It’s not quite right.
I’m 32. My grandmother stands tall in a sari. Majestic. Like the captain of a spaceship.
I’m 33. Meeting Jay Miller in an old warehouse. This place makes “how did THAT make me feel like THIS?” work which I adore. But I don’t write like that. I’m not quite right. Although…
A minute later. I’m watching Jay’s face. Is he thinking or angry?
Hours later. I receive an email that upends my artistic ambitions.
My 34th birthday. I’m at the pub, explaining how late I am delivering “Brown Chekhov in Space”. A virus is in the news. I’m about to get a very long deadline extension.
My grandmother is 88. I play a recording of her great-granddaughter gurgling with delight. One of the last sounds she’ll ever hear.
I’m sat in The Yard. A brown woman performs Chekhov on a (slightly) wobbly spaceship. It’s majestic. She is the captain. My grandmother is eternal. And I am eight again.
Lucy Nurnberg, artist and founder of party collective Uhaul Dyke Rescue
Last summer, we asked The Yard if we could host an afternoon pop-up with Uhaul Dyke Rescue in the courtyard. It was our first year running the Mobile Dyke Bar – our dyke-bar-inside-a-Luton-van – and we were looking for London parking lots where we could pull up, serve tasty cocktails and host one of our legendary arm-wrestling tournaments. The Yard not only agreed but suggested we make one a day-to-night party – ending with our very own clubnight.
The first Uhaul Dyke Rave took place on a scorching August night. Despite it being outrageously hot inside (we later found out the air con was bust), the vibes were immaculate. We called it THE END OF THE WORLD DYKE RAVE because we wanted it to feel like a party for the end times – and it truly was. We built a jungle gym out of scaffolding in the middle of the dancefloor with monkey bars, hoops, even a swing. We couldn’t believe The Yard let us get away with it.
Since then, we’ve thrown three more parties. We’ve drilled people to the walls, thrown push-up competitions on the dancefloor, and served cake cut by stilettos with knives for heels. Silliness aside, The Yard gave us the idea – and the space – to build something vital. Each night has sold out. We’ve watched crowds of dykes feel sexy, free, confident. That in itself feels radical.
Kia Noakes, head of communications
After the final performance of our final show, The Glass Menagerie, I sat in the empty Yard and remembered everything. Every moment I’ve spent in this theatre, with everyone I was lucky to meet because of this place. My colleagues, artists, my best friends, my partner. It’s hard to pick one memory.
Because it can’t just be one thing. It’s all of it.
It’s Helene & Peter, who needed two new tickets after showing up on the wrong day (they came to Queen's Yard Summer Party instead and got body searched in the process and didn’t even bat an eyelid). It’s knowing Rhiannon’s favourite Yard snack is chocolate honeycomb. It’s Fiona who saw The Glass Menagerie four times, and slipping her a discount so she could catch both the final matinee and evening show. It’s Sarah, who I spoke to for twenty minutes, talking through every Yard show she’s ever seen. It’s Olivia winning a free ticket after naming all 50 states of America to us. It’s running downstairs ten minutes before a show with a handwritten postcard, after finding out it was an audience member’s 5000th show. Ever. He got a bit teary-eyed.
I was lucky to run the big stuff – campaigns, strategy, all of it – but the thing that felt most important was picking up the Box Office phone (which FYI is a burner phone that we pay £6 a month for). I did it every day for years. That’s how I got to know all of you: speaking to you, directly.
It’s not flashy. But it’s what I’ll remember.
I joined The Yard at 23. I’m leaving at 30. Somewhere in between, I found my voice – and shaped The Yard’s. Press, copy, campaigns, menus, newsletters, ticketing, images, even the Front of House playlists.
I grew up here. And The Yard grew up with me. It gave me a foundation. I hope I gave it one, too.
Sarah Kosar, artist and dog trainer
Something happened on 19 September 2024 that changed me as an artist: I danced with my dog on the stage at The Yard. We each played the performer and the audience member. I’ve never felt so seen or so capable or so ready to just actually perform instead of pretend I only wanted to be a writer (ha!) We were scouted for Britain’s Got Talent after doing a lot of this dancing and piano tricks together, so we went to The Yard to make him more comfortable with a stage, and asked some of the team to come in to watch. It was the most fun day.
The Yard made me feel like a proper writer when I built my relationship with them and had my plays on: Human Suit as part of First Drafts and then in 2019, a full production of my play Armadillo. But I became a real ARTIST that day with Meatball.
Holly Williams, editor of Exeunt
There was a great third date, with the partner I’m still with seven years on: day-drinking pints at Crate next door and then in The Yard’s bar, so that my memory of The Act, Company 3’s show about teenage sex, is joyful but pretty squiffy. Turning up late to Pxssy Palace, also after day-drinking on other side of London, and the joy of finding my housemates on the dancefloor. And of course the sheer unbelievable magical joy of the moment in This Beautiful Future where there were REAL LIVE CHICKS ON STAGE. (I kind of can’t believe this isn’t everyone’s favourite memory?)
But the one that really sticks out is the time I came face-to-face with myself. I’m not talking about representation on stage or something noble – I’m talking about meeting my actual doppelgänger on the dancefloor. It was at inner u (rip my favourite ever clubnight, i luvved u inner u), and I just kept having weird interactions. Strangers started talking to me with great urgency about [redacted for legal reasons], and when I insisted I didn’t know them, looked deeply wounded. Suddenly, my friend was dragging me across the venue and shouting “it is you!” as she thrust me towards a stranger, who in hair, body, and dance moves was indeed my double.
Every time I went to inner u someone would mistake me for her. It was always weird. But I kind of liked it. Which is also how I felt about quite a lot of theatre at The Yard, to be honest.
Rhianna Ilube, playwright
The Yard was the theatre that programmed and produced my first ever full-length play, and so for that reason alone, the building will be eternally etched (on my heart? soul?). One memory that jumps to mind is summer 2022: it was one of those extreme 40 celsius+ heatwave days, where nobody was outside for long in London if they could help it. This was the date that had been in the diary for months to meet with Jay to discuss my play, Samuel Takes A Break. I was not going to cancel or ask to reschedule, whatever the weather.
Walking in the heat across Stratford’s Olympic Park area to The Yard’s community building felt surreal, like traversing apocalyptic territory; thousands of flats and yet no sign of human life. I found Jay and we sat in The Yard’s office area, drinking lemonade. He said he was interested in programming my play, but was also wondering whether it might be good to commission a new play instead. At that moment, I felt strongly (and possibly without warrant) that I could not write a word of another idea until I had found a home for Samuel, and I wanted that home to be The Yard. The intimacy of the theatre, coupled with the focus on experimentalism and theatrical liveness, felt perfect. I said this and felt that Jay listened closely to my plea.
Months later, I got the call via my agent that The Yard wanted to program the play for 2024, and I broke down in tears on a bench in Hackney Downs. Those tears were warranted, as working with The Yard team and the whole production was better than I could’ve even imagined. It was the right home.
Takero Shimazaki, the architect designing the new Yard theatre
My most vivid memory was when I first walked into The Yard, with this amazing self-made pink volume of theatre, a kind of belly sticking out in the bar space. It’s just one of the most economical but stunning pieces of architecture: you’ve got the efficiency and sustainability mind of today’s architecture, but at the same time, I know that the architects researched [Andrea] Palladio’s theatre in Vicenza to get this amphitheatre effect. It's just really clever piece of architecture: necessity-driven, but beautiful.
Rosemary Waugh, theatre critic
Most of my favourite theatre-meets-weather moments have happened – for obvious reasons – at roofless venues. There was King Lear at the Globe where there really was a massive tempest raging on the heath/Bankside. And that press night for Evita at Regent’s Park where everyone got soaked at the end (Fiona Shaw, who was sat two seats away from me, put a programme on top of her head like a little pointy fisherman’s hat and still looked more glamorous than anyone else in attendance). But my other favourite moment when God or the weather upstaged/supported a director happened at The Yard in 2019, when Jay Miller did Arthur Miller and put The Crucible on stage. Right at the end, when John Proctor is having his moment, the skies cracked open and down came a massive storm on Hackney Wick.
The sound on the wobbly, crashy roof of The Yard was insane, providing the perfect crescendo backdrop to the dying moments of Act Four. This couldn’t have happened anywhere else because it was only thanks to the temporary, bashed-together nature of The Yard’s building that the outside world was able to creep inside so well. Outside-inside, Fringe-mainstream: The Yard has always been this uniquely inbetweeny place.
Jaz Woodcock-Stewart, director
I think I saw the first 20-minute scratch of Beyond Caring by Alex Zeldin and his close actor-collaborators Luke Clarke, Janet Etuk and Jess Tucker Boyd – three brilliant artists, who I trained with at drama school. That was a moment where I felt incredibly excited about what this weird space could offer, and the kind of work The Yard was interested in taking bets on. I’d also like to take a moment to celebrate Big Guns (2017), where I remember first encountering the work of my now long-term collaborator Rosie Elnile. The clarity, boldness and simplicity of that design in that space felt perfect and has stuck with me for many years.
And let’s not forget that Civilisation began in a live draft at The Yard, which Jay initially told me he didn't get it, but let me do it anyway. Civilisation is the work that I'm perhaps most known for; it changed the course of my career and I wouldn't have just worked the biggest job of my career to date without messing around with Morgann [Runacre-Temple], some dancers and actors, in a room at Theatre Deli, paid for by The Yard.
Maddy Costa, theatre writer and dramaturg
The stage was empty for this one, and also not, because there’s no such thing: all buildings carry histories, ghosts, invisible to most perhaps but a shiver of anguish for those who see. That empty stage at the Yard – and the seats, and the lighting box, and the courtyard outside – might hold fond memories for me, but they also recall experiences of frustration, boredom, anger, cruelty, betrayal, shame, which make it not a space I’ll miss.
The empty stage for Peter McMaster’s A Sea of Troubles was teeming with ghosts. Hamlet. Men dancing. Members of Peter’s family. Peter as a child. He conjured them from the nothing as though conducting a séance, moving through the space – Louise Ahl was his choreographer – to shape his body to their memory, or pluck the memory from his body, or bring a lost language back to life. A language of uncertainty, of reaching and failing: everything the male body is encouraged not to do. And a language of theatre – of (to misquote the text) uncertainty dressed up as imagination, of reaching dressed up as possibility, of failing dressed up as social promise, wishing new worlds into being.
A Sea of Troubles was performed as part of the NOW festival in early 2019; I wince to think of where the conversation about masculinity has travelled in the years since. Theatre, too, is a ghost of its former self, and A Sea of Troubles was its elegy.
Lewis G. Burton, DJ, artist, and founder of queer techno rave Inferno
Dear The Yard,
As the walls that once echoed with our laughter and creativity prepare to come down, I find myself reflecting on the profound impact you’ve had on our community and me personally.
For three transformative years, you weren’t just a venue; you were a sanctuary where art, culture, and community converged. You provided a space where we could express ourselves freely, challenge norms, and celebrate our identities without reservation. I recall the nights filled with pulsating music, the vibrant performances that pushed boundaries (as well as flooding the venue!), and the moments of connection that fostered a sense of belonging. You nurtured our growth, allowing us to step into our power and thrive.
It’s rare to find a place that genuinely values the essence of the community it serves. Your commitment to supporting our vision and embracing our authenticity made all the difference.
As we bid farewell, know that your legacy lives on in the memories we've created and the lives you've touched. Thank you.
Dominque Hamilton, hair and make-up artist
The Yard will always hold an extra special place in my heart. It’s one of the first theatres that trusted my creative vision implicitly as a hair and make-up designer and gave me the chance to showcase that vision to its fullest extent. The first iteration of The Flea was the first show that I designed the hair and make-up for at The Yard, and it was a match made in heaven. I distinctly remember my first time meeting ‘the infamous Jay Miller’, whom I am now proud to call my friend: he was on holiday with his family in Cornwall, and still found the time to work around my schedule to zoom me from his camper van.
The brief he gave me then was that The Flea should be “queer”, “filthy”, and “visceral”, (which pretty much describes most of The Yard’s work) and I knew I was hooked! There is no theatre that has made me feel more seen, respected, trusted and championed as a creative than The Yard. My heart breaks to say goodbye to this version of The Yard, where I have created so many beautiful memories – including meeting my darling partner Will Bliss, who starred in the second iteration of The Flea.
But I cannot wait to see what they do next.