Queer Places:
103 Railton Rd, London SE24 0LD, UK

Pearl Alcock - The art of living - Black History Month 2023Pearl Alcock (1934 Jamaica – 2006, London, England)[1] was a club owner and artist, best known as a British outsider artist. One physical space that served as the locus for a number of memories was a gay ‘shebeen’ (unlicensed bar), run from the 1970s in a basement on Railton Road by Alcock. This space was fondly remembered by Simon, a British unemployed white man, as: always heaving … a space this sort of size, 50m2, packed with people dancing, and there would be a bar at the end selling Heineken or cocktail type stuff, martinis and so on … there were only one or two women there, about 80% black men, 20% white I suppose … Of the black guys that would go to Pearl’s … maybe half of them would be in a relationship with a white person, and half would be in a relationship with a black person.

Alcock moved to the UK from Jamaica at the age of 25, abandoning her marriage in Jamaica.[2][3] First finding work as a maid in Leeds, by the 1970s she had opened a dress shop at 103 Railton Road in Brixton[4] and underneath it created an illegal shebeen, popular with the local gay community.[3][5] She herself was known to be bisexual.[5][6] After the first Brixton uprising reduced the amount of customers to her shop she shut it down and opened a cafe at 105 Railton Road.[3][7] The 1985 Brixton uprising brought more financial hardship culminating to a period of the cafe running by candle light as the electricity was shut off.

Pearl’s journey with art began when she was unable to afford a birthday card for a friend so she drew one.[4] Alcock described this realization of her knack for drawing: “I went mad scribbling on anything I laid my hands on,”she explains, “friends admired what I had done and began to bring me materials to use, that is how I started.”[2] By the late 80s she was getting more recognition, her art being exhibited at the 198 Gallery, the Almeida Theatre and the Bloomsbury Theatre. Then in 1990 her work was included in the London Fire Brigade calendar.[3] Monika Kinley, one of the country's leading advocates of Outsider Art, describes her as "a visual poet".[8] She gained mainstream recognition a year before her death when in 2005 her work was included in Tate Britain's first exhibition of art shown under the term Outsider Art.[9] In spite of her high regard in the context of Outsider Art, Pearl Alcock's work has been offered at auction multiple times and only one artwork has sold; this was "Thukela (Tugela) River", which realized $294 USD at Germann Auctions in 2012. In 2019 she was the subject of the retrospective at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.[10]

Pearl died on 7 May 2006 at the age of 72. She was living nearby to where she had been running the three different establishments on Railton Street, and she was still making art. Many attended her funeral.[3]

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