THE LOND ON CLUB
Architecture | Interiors | Art
ANDREW JONES | LAURA HODGSON
WIntroduction
hen most of us visit a club for lunch, dinner or an event, we scarcely have time to stop and consider our surroundings. We naturally focus on our guests or hosts, or the lecture or recital we have come to hear. To stop and peer at a picture, a piece of furniture or a frieze may come across as a little rude. We may come away with an overall impression that the club is beautifully designed (or not) or that it contains some good art, but we may also have been distracted by other stimulants: the vintage of the wine, the consistency of the horseradish sauce, who else was there and the shoes they were wearing. Our vision may also be impaired by non-visual considerations such as the club’s social standing or politics.
This is a book about the way clubs look. Questions of social standing, politics, membership, gender, food, etc. may all be perfectly interesting topics, but they are not in the scope of this book. Of course, the appearance of some clubs reflects, or even supports, their purpose, membership or history and so a purely æsthetic appraisal is not always possible – indeed, a successful club interior must be fit for, and reflect, its purpose – but the overriding emphasis of this book is visual.
This book takes the form of a personal selection of 46 of the most beautiful, interesting and unusual club buildings and interiors in London. While not comprehensive, the selection will, we hope, give you a sense of the range and variety of London clubs. London has more members’ clubs than any other city, with around 130 at the time of writing and new ones opening every year. There are clubs for everyone – from actors, plutocrats, aristocrats and bishops to sailors, soldiers, fishermen and spies, as well as journalists, jockeys, architects and æsthetes – and in every imaginable style from bohemian to bling, shabby to chic, classical or brutal, and for every wallet, be it a bingo player’s or a billionaire’s. This book presents a cross section of these clubs.
above
opposite The Georgian doors to the Great Subscription Room at Brooks’s with their ebony and mother-of-pearl doorhandles
A handful of modern clubs have, instead, opted for vinyl record rooms. In the case of The House of KOKO, members are encouraged to donate an LP when they join, the modern-day equivalent of Regency clubs such as The Travellers which would encourage members to donate books from their personal libraries.
Collections. What is on the walls is generally taken seriously, no matter how old or modern the club. Collections often express what the club stands for: fishing rods and flies in The Flyfishers’; theatrical portraits and memorabilia in The Garrick; militaria in The Cavalry and Guards club; fighter jets in the raf Club; disgraced or revered prime ministers at the Carlton; colonial grandees in the Oriental and East India clubs; Whigs at Brooks’s. Clubs commission contemporary silver (see pages 146–47), paintings and, in the case of The Athenæum and The Travellers, book bindings.
Several modern clubs have gone to great lengths to pull together serious and coherent collections. At The Groucho Club, Nicky Carter (a successful artist in her own right) curates an impressive contemporary British art collection. Soho House’s curatorial team led by Kate Bryan has installed thoughtful and often witty art across different clubs: art to do with broadcasting and television in White City House; locally produced art in Little House Balham; art questioning the skewed gender balance of ftse100 ceos at Ned’s Club. The House of KOKO’s collection, curated by Katie Heller, is closely tied to music and the history of the theatre to which the club is attached. Beth Greenacre assembled a wonderful survey of 60 years of women artists for the now closed AllBright Townhouse. Robin Birley’s clubs are hung with an eclectic and personal mix of pictures and other objects with particular strengths in Modern British artists such as Ceri Richards, Graham Sutherland and John Tunnard, portraits by Birley’s grandfather, Sir Oswald, vintage travel and film posters and canine likenesses. The Arts Club has several rooms reserved for temporary exhibitions, alongside its permanent collections, the Shoreditch Arts Club displays a rich variety of contemporary art, with an emphasis on video pieces, while The House exhibits the work of Royal Academicians such as Cornelia Parker.
The club turret. Victorian and Edwardian turret/pavilion conversions have become quite the thing with all sorts of variations from the pergola-turret on the roof garden of Electric House, to the two beautiful bar pavilions created out of old water towers at Ned’s Club, the striking miniature stage-bar turret in The House of KOKO and the magnificent glass cupola’d dining turret at Upstairs at The Department Store. In today’s clubland, there is an ivory tower for everyone. ♣
A playbill from 1753 in the collection of The Garrick Club
THE CLUBS
TThe Academy
Founded 1989
he Academy, although only 36 years old, is more Georgian than any Georgian club. It occupies the oldest complete building of a London club, a modest but well-preserved Soho house of 1719 perfectly described by Pevsner as a “study in pleasing decay”. Its two candlelit rooms are lined with 18th-century panelling and its walls hung with a collection of rakish 18th-century prints and drawings. The motto on the club’s playful crest quotes Cratinus’ dictum – “Drinking water, you’ll produce nothing of any use” – and the mood of the club is faster than that of any of the 18th-century establishments in St James’s Street.
The Academy is also an expression of two remarkable people: Auberon Waugh, who, as editor of the Literary Review, founded the club in the basement of the magazine’s offices in Beak Street, and Andrew Edmunds, the brilliant print dealer and restaurateur who hosted the club above his restaurant in Lexington Street from 1998 and ran it after Waugh’s death in 2001 until his own demise in 2022.
Elements of the original basement club are still found in the black oilcloth table coverings and in what Edmunds termed the “tobacco cream”-coloured walls, a perpetuation of what one member called the “indescribable uncolour” of the Beak Street basement in which Waugh’s club rule – “Cigarette smoking is encouraged” – appears to have been vigorously enforced. The furnishings are elegantly austere: assorted unmatching stools and chairs, square café tables, a line of coat hooks of varying willingness, two benches upholstered in a well-worn ‘Hairpin’ linen designed by Felix Spicer and a copper-topped bar built by Septimus Waugh. The club table is a constantly morphing configuration of café tables.
left Old prints hang above a bench covered in Felix Spicer ‘Hairpin’ cloth
opposite Long lunch: the club has had tobaccocream walls and black oilcloth table coverings since its Beak Street days
Beefsteak Club
Founded 1876
The Beefsteak Club is dominated by its club table. The club is its table, one of the largest club tables in London for one of London’s smallest clubs and the only eating table in the club. Extending the full length of the club’s main room, the table is as suited to a refectory as it is to a banquet – the archetype of communal dining.
The Beefsteak Club is also a shrine to the gridiron. Having seen the carved stone gridiron on the façade outside (which conceals a ventilation chimney), one of the first things the visitor encounters when he or she arrives inside the club is a colossal Georgian gridiron hanging high on the wall. The gridiron motif continues on the club china and furniture, in the ornaments that dangle from the arts and crafts lanterns, on the silver sporran mount, tobacco boxes and badges on display in the glass-fronted cabinets and in the half-timbered ceiling of the clubroom.
The club table and the gridiron are eloquent expressions of the club’s history, which began in the 1730s when the artist George Lambert, employed to paint scenes in the Covent Garden Theatre, would grill steaks in his studio at the theatre and share them with other theatre workers (although a variant of the story has John Rich, manager of the theatre, grilling the steaks in the theatre). By the 1750s, the “Sublime Society of Beefsteaks”, with a limit of 24 members, had become a weekly steak-eaters’ club with members such as Samuel Johnson and William Hogarth as well as assorted royalty, and a stirring motto: “Beef and Liberty”. Similar to the Society of Dilettanti, the Sublime Society developed rituals with attendant uniforms and paraphernalia.
Bs t James’s s treet s W1 | 1775–76; 1962–64
Boodle’s
Founded 1762
oodle’s combines architectural variety and quality like no other London club. Three distinct styles, each the work of accomplished architects, come together with great aplomb: Adam style; Regency; and New Brutalism.
The story starts on the outside with the exquisite Adam-esque structure built by John Crunden in 1775–76 for the extravagant and short-lived Sçavoir Vivre Club (Boodle’s moved here in 1783): the yellow-brick façade is dominated by a Venetian fan window, with a central pediment, square towers and columned porches, and decorated with Coade roundels of Apollo amid sunflower petals.
Then come the Regency alterations (1821–24) by (the modestly self-middlenamed) John Buonarotti Papworth, the most striking of which is the generous bay window for members to enjoy the spectacle of the street outside (and occasionally vice versa), a device similar to that at White’s a few doors up the street.
And, finally, the changes made to the building in 1962–64 by Peter and Alison Smithson as part of their glorious Economist group of buildings, which substituted the heavy Edwardian terrace of this part of St James’s Street with a group of finely detailed towers around a modern piazza. Boodle’s was released from what had been a colossal and overbearing neighbour to its right and given a prime position on the newly created piazza, “an older building [pulled] into a modern family” (The Economist, 24 December 2016).
In the words of the architects, the club “had to be changed from just an elegant façade to a three-dimensional building with no hidden back elevation”. The club’s old party wall was rebuilt in concrete and faced in brick with Portland stone banding, with a stack of new rooms and handsome bay windows looking onto the raised piazza. A ladies’ wing for the club (along with staff accommodation and kitchens) was created below and three floors of chambers (as the bedrooms are known) incorporated into the tower on the site of what had been the club’s bedroom annexe in Bury Street.
The dining table in the Undress Room is fitted with a revolving wine trolley
AThe Garrick Club
Founded 1831
ll the world’s a stage’ proclaims The Garrick Club’s motto but The Garrick is a club of multiple stages. This is the thespian cousin of The Cavalry and Guards Club: walls lined with moments of high drama on stage rather than on the battlefield. It is also the most perfect combination of a museum and a club: a magnificent and professionally curated collection in a supremely comfortable and homely clubhouse.
The drama begins on the outside. After walking through the hotchpotch of industrial buildings that make up Covent Garden, the first glimpse of The Garrick’s grand and sombre Roman façade always elicits a little gasp, as if the curtain had just risen over a particularly elaborate stage design. Having for many years sported the sootiest street front in London (in what had always seemed like an act of defiant gloom in the face of all the cheery urban renewal around it), the club cleaned its Portland render façade in 2005. Reassuringly, however, the render is going dark again. The club’s external appearance has recently been enhanced by the installation of a wonderful new set of lanterns, based on those that originally graced the façade.
From the outside, Frederick Marrable’s structure of 1864 is a high-Victorian sequel to Barry’s Pall Mall palazzi, The Travellers and The Reform. The club’s grand exterior belies a surprisingly warm and domestic interior, more Victorian English country house than Roman palazzo. It is of an appropriate scale to display the club’s collections but also made intimate by small spaces, dark colours and a wooden staircase.
It is below this staircase, opposite Roubiliac’s likeness of Shakespeare, that lies the most intimate part of the club, reserved for members only. There is something wonderfully eccentric and unique to The Garrick about this place: whereas the equivalent in most other clubs would be used as a waiting room for visitors, it is this loosely partitioned section of the hallway (clearly visible from the hallway and the staircase) that is the members’ enclosure. It is as if, in this most friendly and social of clubs, the members want to look out at, and be seen by, everyone else who might be in the club.
o pp o site On the landing is the chair in which Henry Irving died. Above hang (top row) the actress Eliza O’Neill as Melpomene the Tragic Muse by GF Joseph, Mather Brown’s Last Scene in the Tragedy of the Gamester and Richard Westall’s Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth
left Charles Matthews Junior playing different roles in the members’ area below the staircase
You could write a thesis on the history of London architecture from your deckchair at Ned’s Club. Wherever you look you see architectural masterpieces: Christopher Wren’s dome of St Paul’s dominates the view to the west and you can also admire the spires of his St Mary-le-Bow and St Stephen Walbrook; the golden flicker of the Monument recalling the Great Fire of London, which gave rise to their construction; the Palladian portico of George Dance’s Mansion House is to the east and, beyond, Richard Rogers’ gleaming Lloyd’s building; below you undulate the postmodern flanks of James Stirling’s № 1 Poultry, and behind them wallow the colossi that are Norman Foster’s Walbrook building and Bloomberg headquarters with the delicate cubes of oma’s NM Rothschilds’ building stacked next to them.
left Damascene conversion: the new swimming pool on the roof of the old bank overlooks St Paul’s Cathedral
THE LOND ON CLUB
London has more members’ clubs than any other city. There are clubs for everyone: from actors, plutocrats, aristocrats and bishops to sailors, soldiers, fishermen and spies, as well as journalists, jockeys, architects and æsthetes.
Andrew Jones opens the door to 46 of the most beautiful, interesting and unusual of these clubs, presenting 300 years of architecture and design. The London Club features the oldest clubs in London as well as the most recent, with perfectly preserved interiors, original furniture and extraordinary collections. From bohemian to bling, shabby to chic, classical and brutal, this is a celebration of variety and beauty, with newly commissioned photographs by Laura Hodgson.
“From the grandest to the simplest taking in the quirkiest en route, this book is an irresistible journey through London’s clubland.”
From the Foreword by Nina Campbell obe