My Cottage or Yours?
14th Feb-18th April 2025
Valentine’s Day Special: Archival Queer History in the Photography of Phil Polglaze
South London based photographer Phil Polglaze’s ‘Bog Jobs’ span more than 20 years of cottaging venues along with their jeopardy, precariousness, lure and hazard.
This collection of photographs shows scenes of alleged crimes. From 1978 to 2002, Polglaze was commissioned by solicitors to provide visual records in defence of men arrested in cottaging venues, to establish lines of sight within their structural layout and gauge the feasibility of sexual activity. His work was salient in the discharge of men often wrongly accused of soliciting, importuning and gross indecency.
These spaces are anonymous, stark, vaguely public, and reliant upon the volitional risk associated with gay culture around the time framing decriminalisation. Polglaze’s photography engages a sense of foreboding erotic thrill at the tempting of fate in arguably sordid conditions.
His prolific documentation of these distinctly charged spaces signals to a bygone subculture cultivated by the gay community which modified public space to house their transient ownership. Importuning within an era of widespread bigotry confined the queer community to revolting conditions where public toilets were remodelled as queer spaces under the apprehensive fear of police and anti-gay legislation.
Cottaging was often painted as a barefaced, crude act of indulgence, although perhaps instead was an instance where the oppressed were momentarily freed. However brazen and voyeuristic, these spaces attest to the complex and dark relationship between men chancing their luck with an openly homophobic governmental authority.
Surveillance in these venues was pervasive. Polglaze told The Gay Times: ‘ This cottage, at Home Park near Wembley, was absolutely notorious. Over a single month in 1984, the police arrested 400 men. They got up into the loft, drilled observation holes through the floor and just watched what was going on down below. At the appropriate time, they’d come swarming down from the hatch and start nicking. Usually it was what they called the ‘rule of three’- they’d see a man talking to one bloke, then another, then on the third one, they had enough evidence to arrest him for importuning’.
Polglaze frames cubicle partitions within these volatile locations in an unembellished, formal, documentary style. Many of these infamous cottaging sites have been boarded up, flattened and redeveloped, furthering the archival cultural bearing his photography offers.
Phil Polglaze is a photographer based in South London. His work is featured in The Museum of London, V&A South Kensington and South London Gallery Archive. For enquiries contact philpolglaze@yahoo.co.uk
Curated by Molly Reeve
The Farmer’s Arms exhibition programme is supported by Arts Council England
