tiosmedia.info@gmail.comMembers clubs are a lifelong affliction and anxiety—a quest to sit on an ever better, more exclusive set of sofas; an unthinking hop-skip-jump from prep school, to big school, to Pop, to the Bullingdon, to Hertford Street, to White’s, to Coutts, to the Hurlingham, to the MCC, to the House of Lords—and on and on, upwards and upwards, the air ever thinner and finer, towards the loveliest tomb in the smartest graveyard in the finest Home County in the history of the world (Hampshire; never Surrey). Clubs for dogs (the Kennel Club). Clubs in which to put your golf clubs (Swinley or nothing, if you’re asking). Club sandwiches and club ties and club rules and clubmen (and clubwomen, of course—but we’ll get to the Garrick later).
In London, where the ideal of the members club was very much honed and popularized in the 19th century (though by no means invented), the austere institutions of St. James’s knew that discretion was everything. “Your traditional London clubs tend not to invite attention, let’s say,” says Seth Alexander Thévoz, the author and journalist who wrote Behind Closed Doors, the definitive book on clubland. “White’s, Boodle’s, Brooks’s… they’re very private places, and the demand to find out about them is insatiable,” he says. This, combined with a new sort of tribalism in an increasingly fragmented culture—where your charcuterie and your tote bag might now come to define you—has brought about a rabid blossoming of the members club model. People want to be part of something these days, even if the only reason they want to be a part of something is because other people aren’t a part of it. “The number of new clubs is growing,” Thévoz says. “Because [the] demand to join a club in general is sky-high.” And so this peculiar affliction has now seeped out from the wing-backed stuffiness of St James’s and into the rest of the world. That’s globalism for you.
New York has long had members clubs, Thévoz points out. In fact, its total is second only to London. Places like the Knickerbocker or the Union Club are, in some ways, far snootier than their counterparts across the pond. “I was browsing through the list of one of the major New York clubs quite recently, and there aren’t many people on the rolls who don’t have ‘the Third’ after their name,” says Thévoz. “The clubs are far more socially elitist than the London ones.” But a spate of recent openings in New York is attempting to put a more modern, cosmopolitan twist on the model, to varying degrees of success. (We are largely going to leave Soho House out of this. Something about its public listing rather dulls the notion of a private club. And the fact that there are Soho Houses everywhere now means, in essence, that there are Soho Houses nowhere… in the world of private clubs, at least.)
