See inside London's beautiful and unique private members' clubs
Getting access to London's private members' clubs is a rare occurrence for most people, but now you can see what these often-secretive spaces look like.
It’s hard enough to imagine getting inside London’s exclusive members’ clubs, let alone being allowed to ogle all the details. Which is a shame, because some of the most memorable and important works of architecture and design in this historic city can be found behind these guarded doors.
Few libraries can compete with the gasp-inducing beauty of the Athenaeum, and influencers would likely trample over each other to be allowed to shoot on many of the clubs’ elegant staircases.
Luckily, a gorgeous new book, The London Club: Architecture, Interiors, Art, is offering a long gawk inside these hallowed halls. With text by Andrew Jones and original photographs by Laura Hodgson, it’s an incredibly detailed look at clubs old and new—many of which have not been photographed like this in years, if ever.
We caught up with the pair to talk about their process, tips for architectural and design photography, some of the spectacular things they saw, and how you can get a peek inside in winter.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When you're looking at these pictures or you go inside, what does the design of a club tell you about it?
Last Chance - Save up to $20!
Andrew Jones: Let's start with the end papers of the book, which show these club tables. Now, a club table is a communal table. Not all clubs have them, and one of the more eccentric things we did was go around measuring them and doing little scale drawings. Our designer was quite surprised to be given a bunch of dimensions and sketches and told to do something with them. The reason I did it was I thought it would really express what clubs stood for in many ways, or what the vibe of a club was.
So, take the Garrick Club, which is an extremely social, jolly club where everybody is talking to each other. Their main table is the club table, and it is literally the length of a double decker bus. It seats 29 people, and as you work through [the end papers] you see different clubs, maybe more private or people are more restrained, and they have smaller club tables.
And I think the same is true of all sorts of other angles. The art on the walls—it tells you all about obvious things. If it's a military club, it'll be people killing each other. If there's a fishing club, people killing fish. If it's a literary club, you'll have authors and you'll have libraries devoted to the works of members.
Some clubs have got very specific collections, There's a club called Boodle’s, which has also had a very strong sort of aristocratic country membership, and they've got fish and horses everywhere, which is entirely appropriate. So it is often very reflective of the sort of club that you're in.
The photos are striking, so it's kind of the obvious question which is, which club did each of you find the most beautiful to go inside?
Laura Hodgson: I think the Athenaeum has the most beautiful library. I really love that. The staircase of the Athenaeum is spectacular, and it's just got a very classical English feel. But if I was looking for the quirks of the club, there's a club called the London Sketch Club, and I love their drawing space there, and the pictures around the wall, which are of the old cartoonists who were old members of the club.
Andrew Jones: They're all beautiful, which is how they were selected for the book, I suppose. So I'd answer the questions differently, which is that the clubs that fascinate me the most visually, were the ones that I could never become a member of because I'm not a soldier, a pilot, a fisherman—I’m not all sorts of things. Those clubs are there for a very particular purpose and it's just a different world. I love that. It's very beautiful to go into a sort of microcosm somewhere.
Were there any particularly unusual ones where you kind of go in and you're like, it's a bit taken aback?
Laura Hodgson: The Mildmay Club.
Andrew Jones: Yeah, that's amazing.
Laura Hodgson: I love that club. It's a working men's club in North London. It's astonishingly beautiful. It's been really well preserved and it's been preserved in its different decades, whether it was 1900 or the 1960s/70s when they did some changes, but then they kept those changes. It's a sort of delicate history of that particular area.
Laura, when you were photographing these, both rooms and the exteriors, what were you trying to capture about each of these spaces?
Laura Hodgson: For the interiors, I wasn't trying to get the whole space. It was more about the feeling of the space. If things were dark, I'd let them be dark, or if there's a beautiful light filled room, I didn't mind it being blown out. I just loved to feel like you were in a light-filled space. That was part of it. It was less the accuracy and more the feel of it.Sometimes that’s what you find in the details, as much as in an overall scene.
Was there a room or a club that was particularly difficult to photograph?
Laura Hodgson: Well, situationally, me photographing in men's loos is tricky, obviously.
I did appreciate that insert, though, on the bathrooms.
Andrew Jones: They are very beautiful places, funnily enough
Laura Hodgson: Otherwise, we photographed a swimming pool at what we thought was before it would be in use at like, 5 a.m., and there were already three old men in the swimming pool. Oh, my goodness!
Andrew Jones: They just popped up. We didn't actually see them at first, their heads just came out of the water.
Laura Hodgson: That was at the RAC, which is the automobile club, but it's got the greatest swimming pool. So that was a little challenge, because we didn't ever want to disturb people. We aimed to do all the photographs when no one was in the spaces.
Andrew Jones: It was a rush before those first footsteps coming towards lunch.
Laura Hodgson: For the exteriors, it was sunny Sundays and bank holidays. For some clubs, we didn't know we'd get in. The approach was a slow process so often I would go and do the exteriors in the hope that we might get in. The Chelsea Arts Cub, for example, has an amazing exterior for their summer ball and they get someone to paint it really beautifully. I thought it would be crazy not to do that just because at the moment they're not sure whether they want to be in [the book].
How was getting access? What was that process like?
Andrew Jones: It was lengthy and involved lots of discussion, very friendly discussion, actually, but obviously these are all very private places and many of which were not photographed properly before. They don’t allow people to have phones, most of them, so there's very little on Instagram or that sort of source.
The last book that's in any way comparable to ours was done in 1979 and was slightly updated about 15 years ago. But it was only a few gentlemen's clubs and it wasn't really about the interior. Nobody knew quite what to make of our request, I think. It was really a question of, I suppose, reassuring people that what we were doing was very much about interiors and architecture.
Laura Hodgson: And collections.
Andrew Jones: Most people write about the gossip and how expensive, how fancy the club is and the history, all that stuff. But we had a very different approach. We were very friendly people. Then often they’d go to their boards or their committees to decide. So it took, in some cases, many months to go through, but it was really positive, even if it took a while..
Laura Hodgson: And they were incredibly kind, really, because it was a risk they hadn't often done before or for a long time or only for weddings.
On some level, all of us who travel now are amateur interior and architectural photographers, right? I'd be curious about some of the things that you keep in mind as you're photographing some of these spaces that might be insightful for readers who either are amateur or trying to be more professional with that.
Laura Hodgson: One of the sort of crucial things that everyone is working towards is things being as straight as they possibly can be in every way. So a geared tripod head is the most useful thing that you can make micro-changes without having to kind of restart again if you use a ballhead or something. So I found that super helpful.
I used only natural light as much as I possibly could (in some cases lights were linked and could not be turned off). For example, for the Home House staircase photograph, we worked with lights as they were and recorded both natural light from the skylight and what would have been candlelight from below.
I enjoy mirrors in photographs and seeing more of the space—the Union Club has an interesting use of mirrors as does the Turf Club. And … don't miss the sort of details that catch your eye. The thing that I did on a whim was the cover, and that shot was just done on a moment as we walked down a corridor. We were rushing. We didn't have that much time. I'm really pleased I got that shot because it's a nice record of that.
Andrew Jones: Some of those details tell you much more about the club than in some cases than the big pictures. Get up close as well as taking the sort of spectacular shots.
Why does London have so many clubs?
Andrew Jones: We sort of invented the club, I suppose, almost. I think actually some of the oldest clubs the world were in the southern states in the U.S. and in India. [The London clubs] grew out of these coffee houses and they were basically casinos and sort of social bases for gambling and talking politics. Then they had different boosts at different periods. When the Houses of Parliament burned down, basically all politics moved even more into clubs for a few years.
We had an unbelievable boom in the 19th century of this huge middle class growing, and this huge civil service, this huge India Service. There were whole clubs catering exclusively for people going to India and coming back. And so it sort of reflected our society a bit…[But] I think New York has got … an amazing, amazing varied club scene.
Laura Hodgson: There's also the thing that in England you've got one very large city in the country and people would use [clubs] as hotels before hotels. So it was where people could have a base, whether they actually stayed there or didn't stay there, but it was their base in London. And that felt really important and people would live in the country and come in. Whereas I think when you have more cities in the country, like, say, Germany, you don't need that quite so much.
Andrew Jones: And we never had a café society here, like Vienna or France, we just didn't have that. We had coffee houses but they were like pubs really. I think currently, the new club boom, apart from being a sort of fashion thing, it's actually a bit of a real estate play. If you're working from home and you've got the choice between increasing your mortgage and getting an extra bedroom, or paying 3,000 pounds a year for Soho House. It makes more sense to have a club where you can do all sorts of things and work from. So it's a function of real-estate costs in London, a bit, and people using the modern clubs to do business in, which was less the case for the older clubs.
Laura Hodgson: Also a restaurant where you can reliably get a table.
If you were, say, a shameless American on your way to London, where would you be angling for an invite?
Andrew Jones: Any club, because each club tells so much about the city. It's a closed world. That's the wrong way around to answer it, but any club is interesting because it's closed by definition.
I suppose it sort of depends who the American is. What your interests are. If you're a fly-fishing American, then a fly-fish club is the club you really want to be. If you're an actor, the Savile or the Garrick.
Laura Hodgson: Look at the bookshelves, that's what I'd say when they go in, look at the bookshelves, see what's there. And the ceilings, the ceilings have been astonishing. Look up.
Andrew Jones: If you are visiting from New York, Philadelphia or Los Angeles, then a visit to the Lansdowne Club will complement some of the great treasures in your home museums. The club is a conversion of an aristocratic home, Lansdowne House. The magnificent original 18th-century Robert Adam-designed Dining Room is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York while the elegant Drawing Room is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. If you go to the Getty Villa in Malibu or to LACMA, you will find a number of important Greek and Roman sculptures that once were displayed in what is now the club’s ballroom.
Even if you don’t get to visit a club, remember that if you are in London in winter, and you go for an early morning or evening walk along Pall Mall or St James’s Street, you will get great walk along Pall Mall or St James’s Street, you will get great views of lit-up club interiors
