Before I knew anything about anything, I always imagined that Los Angeles would have more private clubs than any other city in the world. It stood to reason, I thought, as LA is always full of celebrities and if there’s one thing that celebrities hate more than anything else it’s muggles. If you’re a famous person then the very last place you want to find yourself is somewhere where you are forced to mix with people who aren’t famous.
But I was wrong (although not about slebs avoiding muggles). There are hardly any private members’ clubs in LA and most of them are owned by a Brit, Nick Jones, the wizard who invented Soho House.
No, the city with the greatest density of members-only clubs is London, and they’re all full, every night they’re open. A few years ago I was working on a list of the best clubs in London, and, unable to sleep one night, I started making my own list, counting them like people used to count sleep. I got to 50 before I started checking my phone.
The fact that these places are full of creative titans has made the city even more attractive worldwide
Seems it’s impossible to open a members’ club in London and not make a success of it. Which prompts the question: why? Back in the day, the only clubs were those great bastions of the Establishment, the St James’s clubs like White’s, Brooks’s and the RAC, the kind of places old men used for an afternoon kip after a long, Burgundy-fuelled lunch. If you weren’t reading the Telegraph then you were probably attempting to buy it. Then, in the Eighties, Soho started filling up with tiny clubs like Blacks and the Union, which were invented to cater for the generation that was outgrowing nightclubs. In essence they were like members-only restaurants. And they thrived. Now there are places to suit most professionals, whether you’re a banker or an artist, whether you want West End Chic (Home House, for instance, with the best gym in London), Mayfair Catwalk (probably owned by Richard Caring), a Hot-Desk-Home-From-Home (Mortimer House for instance) or one of those places that you really can’t get into (for example the Chelsea Arts Club, which is one of the best private members’ clubs in the world).
So far so what, you might think. But the cultural IP of these places (is there a collective noun for them?) is an extraordinarily powerful component of London’s standing as a creative hub; the fact that these places are full of some of the most successful creative titans of their era (and indeed, deliberately target them) has made the city even more attractive as an international creative centre. Which means they contribute an enormous amount to our creative GDP. For instance, I’ve lost count of the times Hollywood movie productions block book these places for the duration of a shoot. That’s the other thing about private members’ clubs — many place a lot of importance on international membership, which makes them more attractive to an international creative community that thinks nothing of hopping on a plane for a meeting. Because while Zoom meetings have become the orthodoxy now, even if you’re only two cubicles away, Hollywood will confirm that there’s nothing to compare to actually being in the room.
Of course, there are some places that are out of reach of the international film community, clubs which pride themselves on forever being true to the strictures of their origin, clubs that enjoy abiding by their own rules.
When the Groucho Club opened in 1985, it was the first of the new breed of clubs catering to London’s young media professionals, which included the music and film industries as well as publishing. It was named after Groucho Marx’s famous maxim that he wouldn’t join any club that would have him as a member. It’s just as well he never wanted to join the Hurlingham, the super elite tennis club down in Fulham. It’s so popular that they’ve closed their membership list; the only way you can join is as an offspring of an existing member.
And how long have they closed the list for?
Forever.
