R-Bar will close permanently on Sunday 20 September after 21 years on Marine Parade, the venue announced on Tuesday.
The seafront bar is owned by Revenge Brighton and operates as the sister venue to Club Revenge, functioning as both a daytime spot and the standard pre-club stop before a night downstairs. In a statement, R-Bar said costs had risen dramatically and that despite everything it had tried, the business was no longer financially sustainable.
The announcement came days after Charles Street Tap confirmed it will also shut in September, when its lease expires, after 25 years.
Three in Three Months
This is the third Brighton LGBTQ+ venue to go since the spring.
The Queery, the community café, bookshop and event space, closed permanently in May after members voted to dissolve the co-operative running it, citing unresolved organisational problems alongside financial pressure. Charles Street Tap announced last week. R-Bar followed on Tuesday.
R-Bar’s own statement made the point directly, describing the loss of another venue at a time when safe queer spaces matter more than ever, and asking people to use the bars that remain — noting they are there for the community year-round but can only survive if people keep turning up.
Chris Ward, MP for Brighton Pavilion and Peacehaven, called it a huge loss and said the closures showed more needs to be done locally and nationally to support the night-time economy.
What It Means for Kemptown
The practical effect is concentrated in a small area. R-Bar, Charles Street Tap and Club Revenge sit within a few hundred metres of one another in Kemptown, which is where Brighton’s LGBTQ+ nightlife has been anchored for decades.
Losing two of them inside a month thins that out considerably. The remaining venues — Revenge, Legends, Queens Arms, Bar Broadway, the Curzon, the Kemptown Klub — absorb the trade, but the choice narrows, and a scene built on having somewhere for every mood works less well with fewer rooms in it.
Brighton has marketed itself on this for thirty years. It is worth asking what the city intends to do about a pattern that is now clearly a pattern rather than bad luck.
R-Bar’s last trading day is Sunday 20 September.
Related Reading
- Brighton Pride 2026 — Diana Ross, RAYE, RuPaul & Jessie J
- Events in Brighton: Upcoming Brighton Events 2026
- What’s On in Brighton This Weekend
