Grand tour: inside London’s most striking - and spectacular - members’ clubs
A version of this article was published in the Financial Times Globetrotter column, 9 September 2025
https://on.ft.com/4myg752
Epicentres of banter, business, politics and play, members’ clubs have long been integral to the social tapestry of London. What started in the 17th century as informal gambling rooms in chocolate and coffee houses matured in the second half of the 1700s into standalone clubs of ever-increasing splendour, the earliest serving as aristocratic casinos, with subsequent generations of clubs celebrating politics, professions and pastimes. Today, there are clubs for everyone – from actors, plutocrats, aristocrats and bishops to sailors, soldiers, fishermen and spies, as well as journalists, jockeys, architects and aesthetes. London has more members’ clubs than any other city: around 130 at the time of writing and new ones opening each year.
While the membership, politics and social standing of clubs have been the subject of copious commentary, their aesthetics are often overlooked. Over the past couple of years, I visited dozens of clubs across London for a book on the most beautiful, interesting and unusual club buildings and interiors. I was dazzled by three centuries of architecture and design, often better preserved than domestic or institutional buildings of the same period. The visual variety in London clubs is astounding, from Regency Florentine-palazzo-style buildings to resolutely modern environments.
Below are seven of my favourite London club buildings across the last three centuries, from St. James’s to the City taking in Brixton and Newington Green along the way.
18th Century casino - Brooks’s, St James’s Street, SW1 (founded 1762; building 1776-78)
The Palladian façade of Brooks’s designed by Henry Holland. ©️ Laura Hodgson
Behind architect Henry Holland’s handsome Palladian façade, framed gaming chips, salty betting books and busts of Georgian statesman Charles James Fox remind you that Brooks’s was once a gambling house favoured by Whigs (in contrast to the more Tory-leaning Boodle’s and White’s opposite). Several of Holland’s elegantly restrained interiors remain largely intact, adorned with roundels by the Venetian-born Antonio Zucchi and sumptuous mahogany doors fitted with ebony and mother of pearl handles.
While the club’s walls are hung with portraits of 18th-century members of the Society of Dilettanti, a group of antiquity-loving scholars and noblemen, the days of drunkenness, all-night gambling, saucy bets and parliamentary plotting are long gone. Today, beneath the quick gazes and billowing blouses of these fast-living Georgian rakes, perfectly pressed pillows provide respite to what has been described as the club’s “ferociously cultured” membership – two eras united by their copious use of starched cloths; while elsewhere an 18th-century faro table, which once propped up Bacchic gamblers, quietly displays copies of Apollo magazine.
The Card Room, one of several of Holland’s interiors to have remained largely intact. ©️ Laura Hodgson
Portraits of the 18th-century Society of Dilettanti in the library, with pillows to “provide respite to what has been described as the club’s “ferociously cultured” membership.” ©️ Laura Hodgson
The Great Subscription Room has also hardly changed since it was designed by Henry Holland. ©️ Laura Hodgson
Regency civilisation – The Athenæum, Pall Mall/Waterloo Place, SW1 (founded 1824; building 1827-30)
“The most splendid façade in London clubland: Decimus Burton’s Athenæum.” ©️ Laura Hodgson
The Athenæum was designed by Decimus Burton (also known for the nearby Wellington Arch and The Holme mansion in Regent’s Park) and its façade is the most splendid in London clubland: Athena, goddess of wisdom and patron of learning and the arts, extends a welcoming hand to those entering the Doric porch below; above her, an 80-metre carved marble frieze depicts the Panathenaic procession, Athena celebrated.
The Athenæum is a finely-preserved expression of a Regency idea of civilisation, learned, rational and proper, a world apart from the boisterous clubs of St James’s, instead a politically-neutral place where learning and achievement were valued over affiliation or birth. Members, a blend of academia and establishment, are still known as “Athenians”.
Whereas the heart of an 18th-Century club was its gaming room, the later Athenæum’s is its library. Relics of former Athenians are displayed in Burton’s three-tiered structure, including chemist and physicist Michael Faraday’s wheelchair and a seat from Charles Dickens’ “Swiss chalet” in which he is said to have written Great Expectations.
Greece gives way to Italy as you continue west along Pall Mall admiring Sir Charles Barry’s Renaissance Revival palazzi: first, The Travellers Club (founded 1819 and a club for globetrotters, diplomats and spies) built from 1839-32, in the Florentine style on the front and Venetian at the back. Next, the liberal bastion of clubland that is The Reform Club (founded 1836; built 1838-41), a grandiose interpretation of a Roman palazzo executed around the same time as Barry was starting work on the Gothic revival Houses of Parliament.
The gilded statue of Athena on the club’s first-floor balcony. ©️ Laura Hodgson
A statue of Apollo stands at the top of the staircase in the hall. ©️ Laura Hodgson
The three-tiered South Library is the “heart of the Athenæum.” ©️ Laura Hodgson
Victorian château - National Liberal Club, Whitehall Place, Westminster (founded 1882; building 1884-87)
The National Liberal Club in Whitehall. ©️ Laura Hodgson
Clubs boomed in Victorian London, peaking at around 400. The largest and most magnificent club (and also a rare survivor) of that era is the National Liberal Club. It occupies one end of the immense riverside terrace that is Whitehall Court, a sort of displaced Loire château, Chambord-sur-Thames, in which Italian and French Renaissance elements are combined by Alfred Waterhouse, the architect of the Natural History Museum.
The club is a temple to the tile. Corridors, walls, columns and capitals are covered in an extraordinary range of faïence designed by Waterhouse and made by the Burmantofts Pottery in Leeds. Mustard-yellow columns on green-brown bases support chocolate-brown capitals, all of gleaming pottery.
Paintings, busts and stained glass depictions of Liberal grandees, from William Gladstone (his axe is also on display) and William Harcourt to Lord Roseberry and John Morley, keep a watchful eye on the current members, liberal stalwarts to this day.
The club’s 1951 staircase replaced the original, which had been destroyed in the second world war. ©️ Laura Hodgson
The Smoking Room, which was converted to a library in the 1980s. ©️ Laura Hodgson
Edwardian ocean liner – The Royal Automobile Club, Pall Mall, SW1 (founded 1897; building 1908-11)
The gigantic RAC was conceived as a “monument to automobilism." ©️ Rob Cadman/The Royal Automobile Club
Conceived in the early days of motoring as a “monument to automobilism”, the RAC remains London’s most opulent club building. Huge and lavishly designed, it more closely resembles a New York club than its relatively modest neighbours in St. James’s.
Architecturally, it is the younger sibling of The Ritz, completed four years earlier by the fashionable firm of Mewès & Davis. While The Ritz brings the Rue de Rivoli to London, the RAC is a reworking of Ange-Jacques Gabriel’s grand hôtels on the Place de la Concorde, with the addition to the pediment of motorcycle-riding cherubim. The interiors are, for the most part, enthusiastically French, a riot of “Tous les Louis” but with a few Georges thrown in.
Automobilia are to be found everywhere: an art deco racing car speeds across the sober stuc walls; a dial from the Blue Bird sits on a mantelpiece; even the taps in the loos are in the shape of mid-century bonnet mascots. In the Library, you will find an extraordinary collection of bound motorcar and racing magazines, volumes on particular marques (such as a first edition of Triumph by Name, Triumph by Nature), technical tomes (including Heldt’s Torque Converters), histories (Il Radiatore nel Tempo), as well as works more philosophical in nature (Improving the British Car).
The club has the feel of an ocean liner – you step onboard and never have to leave, such is the range of attractions: restaurants, library, barber, post office, mosaiced pool (at 26.3 metres, longer than any London hotel pool, its Doric diving board alas dismantled), squash courts, Turkish baths, and, originally, shooting range, photographic studio, fencing room and bowling alley. It is no surprise that Mewès & Davis would go on to design luxury ships.
The double-height vestibule with a 1952 Jaguar C-type on display. ©️ Laura Hodgson
The Segrave Room is named after the world land-speed record holder Sir Henry Segrave, whose portrait by Albert H Collings hangs over the fireplace, flanked by paintings of car races by Tim Layzell. ©️ Laura Hodgson
Working men’s club with mid-century accents - The Mildmay Club, Newington Green, N16 (founded 1888; building 1900/1960-70s)
“A Victorian working men’s club encased in a rich and delicious layer of 1960-70s decorative aspic”: The Mildmay. ©️ Laura Hodgson
The Mildmay Club is a Victorian working men’s club encased in a rich and delicious layer of 1960-70s decorative aspic. The club is as surprising as it is appealing; its upright Victorian façade gives no indication of the mid-century pleasures within.
The best-preserved room from 1900 is the cavernous billiards room, the green felt of whose nine tables glows beneath batteries of coin-operated lights. Its walls are lined with padlocked cue-cases, some of which, it is said, belong to soldiers who never returned from the first world war. Darts remain an important part of club life; there are shelf-loads of trophies in the form of lilliputian darts players frozen mid-throw, dartus interruptus.
Textures tease the eye wherever it roams: anaglypta, lincrusta, flock, Formica, tinsel foil, varnished veneer, vinyl, wallpapers buckling under the weight of high-gloss paint, lino à gogo. An occasional cigarette burn brings back memories of smokier days, leisurely puffs (and a little passive smoking) over an evening of bingo.
Admirably, Mildmay has resisted the twin temptations to modernise (opting to restore vintage lighting and furniture rather than buying reproductions or new designs) and to un-modernise by stripping things back to their architectural roots. Its 1960s and ’70s accretions are loved as much by the traditional older members as by newer joiners, typically more recent arrivals in the neighbourhood. When you visit Mildmay and see how these mid-century additions have been preserved, you realise just how rare and fragile that period has become.
The nine-table Billiards Room. ©️ Laura Hodgson
A first world war roll of honour for the “Mildmay Chums”, volunteer soldiers from the club. ©️ Laura Hodgson
City suavity - The Walbrook, Walbrook, EC4 (founded 2000; building 1952)
The Walbrook’s hallway, lined with Piranesi prints, is a rare example of a surviving Mark Birley club interior. ©️ Laura Hodgson
A passer-by could easily mistake this dainty Queen Anne Revival building, clinging to the side of St Stephen Walbrook, for an old church rectory.
The Walbrook’s playful façade conceals its true history: we are in the heart of the real estate empire of the Palumbo family, and this was Palumbo HQ. The house was built in 1952 as a family office by developer Rudolph Palumbo on the edge of the Blitzkrieg-ravaged Salters’ Hall, which he had acquired for redevelopment. Rudolph’s son, Peter (Lord Palumbo), saved St Stephen’s Walbrook (also commissioning its Henry Moore altarpiece) and developed Sir James Stirling’s No. 1 Poultry nearby.
The club began as a joint venture with Mark Birley, founder of Annabel’s, who, with designer Anthony Collett, remodelled and redecorated the house in 1999. Much of the original Birley interiors remain, making the club a rare survivor of the empire of chic he created, much loved by its cultured City clientèle (his other clubs, including Annabel’s, George and Harry’s, have mostly been reinvented and/or redecorated).
The family’s influence is felt throughout, starting with a model of Lord Palumbo’s hand in the hallway which evokes the business deals that have been struck in its discreet boardrooms as much as the warm welcome experienced by visitors. Family portraits by Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Egerton-Cooper, Lord Snowdon and R.B. Kitaj make it a very personal environment along with beautiful and varied objects acquired over years of collecting: an early Cecil Beaton self-portrait, a pair of Russian Constructivist plates, John Lennon drawings.
The Walbrook is a place with the feel of a family home, with the advantage of being a members’ club: a warm and hospitable cocoon in which you can (almost) never outstay your welcome.
The club is housed in a mid-century Queen Anne-style building at the side of St Stephen Walbrook church in the City. ©️ Jacob Turney
The dining room, with its resident swan and, on the wall to the left, “Broken Plates” by Richard Wentworth. ©️ Laura Hodgson
A model of Lord (Peter) Palumbo’s hand greets visitors on arrival. ©️ Laura Hodgson
The Green Room, with its William Morris wallpaper and a painting by British artist Ben Johnson of the Cini Foundation in Venice. ©️ Laura Hodgson
Contemporary design - Upstairs at the Department Store, Stockwell Avenue, SW9 (founded 2018; building 2018)
Upstairs at the Department Store is a rooftop members’ club in Brixton, south London. ©️ Laura Hodgson
Upstairs at the Department Store is the first wholly new London club building in more than 50 years, a luminous pavilion rising from the roof of what once was the Bon Marché department store. It is the work of Squire & Partners whose offices occupy the beautifully converted Edwardian building below. An architects’ canteen at lunchtime, the club attracts Brixton’s creative crowd.
Visually, the club is all about its architecture: construction, materials, furnishings and setting, all in perfect harmony. Copper sheets gleam alongside young oak ceilings and black plywood walls, lending a warm glow to the bar and fireplace. Monumental oak columns have a tree-like presence and were turned in Holland using ship mast-making techniques.
The main pavilion opens on to a luxuriant terrace: apple, pear and olive trees and hedges of fragrant lavender abuzz with Brixton bees. At the end sits an Edwardian turret whose cupola has been replaced with a remarkable emerald glass dome, a modern-day version of an Elizabethan banqueting house, but with the added glamour of having been made in Switzerland.
Once Upstairs, you may never wish to come down.
The club’s lounge, with its copper-panelled fireplace wall, carpet by Eley Kishimoto based on Victorian patterns found elsewhere in the building and sofas by Minotti. ©️ Laura Hodgson
At one end of the rooftop terrace is an Edwardian turret, its cupola replaced with a glass dome. ©️ Laura Hodgson
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Adapted from The London Club: Architecture; Interiors; Art by Andrew Jones with photographs by Laura Hodgson (ACC Art Books, £50)