Lucy and Pippa Tallant have opened the Crossbar, in Brighton, to create a place for women to feel comfortable watching all sport
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ou can’t miss it, the giant “Crossbar” flanked by two stylised crosses in black on the whitewashed outside walls glares down the street, a stone’s throw from Brighton’s Churchill Square. Outside is the narrow shelf that the co-owner Lucy Tallant, the DIY enthusiast of the pair, attached to the wall for those wanting to hang around outside. As she worked on that shelf, two girls walked past and one proclaimed: “Yeah, they’re opening a lesbian club.” “A lesbian club?” replied the other, “Yeah, there’s one outside now.”
Lucy was in stitches, and so was social media when she posted about what she had overheard. The shelf has become a thing, with lesbians posing for photographs and then sharing online with versions of “there’s one outside now” as the caption.
Crossbar has taken on a life of its own in the few months since Lucy and her wife, Pippa Tallant, announced to their 12 followers on Instagram, all their close friends, that they were opening the first women’s sports bar in the UK. They don’t like the camera but they thought they had better announce and get it out of the way. “So, we just filmed it, one take, and were like: ‘Nobody will see this, I’ll just put it up there and then it will be buried and we’ll do a normal post once we open’,” says Pippa.
