"An interview with Matthew Rivett, Club Secretary of the Oriental Club"
Highlighting one of the big London Clubland turnarounds of the last decade
While I’m probably best known as an historian of Clubland, a lot of my professional career background comes in the field of leadership development, through working for the Leadership Centre from 2007 to 2021. Much of the work there revolved around transformation & change management, systems leadership, political leadership, and intractable ‘wicked’ problems. And I’ve never entirely stopped working in this area, because of the considerable overlap with Clubland, and its challenges. And every club has its challenges.
Clubs are often thought of as being very fusty establishments, with practices mired in the 19th century. And this has been the case in some of the less successful ones; it’s certainly a factor in the historic 90% attrition rate of private members’ clubs which I’ve highlighted. But even the most traditional clubs have had to adapt considerably to survive.
It was therefore a pleasure to read something from 2017, which I’m happy to share a link to: “An interview with Matthew Rivett, Club Secretary of the Oriental Club”, with Bee Heller. Reading this, it’s clear that Rivett really “gets it”, on how even traditional clubs need to adapt, just to stay the same.
And my own anecdotal impression of the Oriental Club very much underlines everything he says in the piece. When I first visited the Oriental Club in the 2000s, truth be told, I thought it was a very tired, threadbare place. That’s not unusual in Clubland; I don’t believe in “naming and shaming” clubs that are currently looking a tad shabby, because it’s far from unusual, and these things can be cyclical - the most sumptuous clubs today have often been through some very hard patches in the not-too-distant past; while some clubs which were visibly struggling a few years ago can be flourishing only a few years later. And I mention the case of the Oriental Club, because it’s apparent in this, their bicentenary year, that they’ve thoroughly turned around the position of a decade or so ago.
The previous appearance of the Oriental Club dining room. (Photo credit: ‘Bernard C.’. FourSquare, 2020.)
You certainly see this in bricks and mortar. I thought the Oriental Club’s main dining room used to be a rather faded, bland room, even slightly depressing - and I know I wasn’t alone in that assessment.
But for the Club’s bicentenary this year, the dining room had a comprehensive renovation, and I regard the result as one of London’s most characterful dining spaces. I’ve often seen heritage spaces ruined by attempts at “modernisation” that strip out much of the period charm; but this is something different altogether. I take my hat off to them.
The newly-renovated Oriental Club dining room in 2024. (Source: Oriental Club website.)
You can see a video of the dining room transformation process below.
Time-lapse video of the transformation. (Video credit: The Luxury Property Forum, for the Oriental Club.)
But you also see this spirit in their adaptability. During the Covid-19 pandemic, it did not escape my attention how fleet-of-foot the Oriental Club was. The Club has long had a signature dish of curry. They spun this off into being the first London club to run a “Dine at Home” delivery service, distributing meals cooked in the Club’s kitchens. Like all the best clubs, old and new, they were using innovation and experimentation in delivering a well-established identity, rather than just falling back upon reputation alone.
And all that makes more sense, having read the interview with Matthew Rivett. Anyway, you can read the piece here.
