London club billiard rooms

A visual guide

Billiards is often thought of as a quintessential London clubland pastime, often cropping up in literary depictions of clubs. Yet you would be hard-pressed to find any clubs with billiard tables left. Much like working club libraries, they are something of an endangered species in London. Of the 133 or so clubs of London today, barely a dozen clubs have “billiard rooms” - and none of them actually has a billiards table. They typically use snooker tables (which are smaller, with pockets); or in a couple of cases, they use even smaller pool tables. And those billiard rooms which do exist are rare survivors - club committees have tended to be all too willing to sacrifice this amenity, to reuse the space as private dining, or bedroom acoommodation, or an extra bar. This is a brief visual guide to those billiard rooms which still survive in London today.

(For this peek into this world, all photos used are pre-existing ones, already in the public domain. A couple of rooms have been omitted, due to my being unaware of such a picture.)

We start with Boodle’s, the second-oldest club in London. Their snooker table is at the rear of the first floor.

(Photo credit: The Campaign for Real Gin website.)

Brooks’s, London’s third-oldest club, also has a billiard room, though as there are no public-domain pictures of it, it isn’t featured here.

The Chelsea Arts Club has a light and airy snooker table setup, in front of their main bar.

The East India Club’s snooker tables are down in the recently redeveloped basement.

In recent years, the Garrick’s “billiard room” has been overhauled, with its snooker table pictured here.

The Groucho Club is the only one of the “new” clubs to have a pool table - though as it recently celebrated its 40th anniversary, the word “new” is used relatively. Nevertheless, it remains the case that London’s flurry of new clubs from the last decade have not opted to offer snooker or pool.

The National Liberal Club’s snooker table is on the lower-ground floor, with a “tricky corner” (mainly the result of the lift shaft of an old “dumb waiter” in the corner).

The Oriental Club’s snooker table enjoys plenty of natural light - not always the case in other club “billiard rooms.”

The Oxford and Cambridge Club very cunningly adapted a lower basement room deep in the bowels of the Club, into today’s “billiard room.”

The Reform Club’s “billiard room”, hidden to one side of the first floor, has a spacious spectator’s gallery, with seating behind the Corinthian columns.

The Royal Automobile Club - as befits the largest clubhouse ever built in London - retains the largest “billiard room” in Clubland today, with an array of snooker tables.

The Savile Club’s “billiard room” is in a ground-floor annexe at the back, behind the bar and terrace. Savilians have long played their own variant “Savile Snooker” - the rules were first written down in the late 1960s, but it is believed to have been played since the early 20th century.

And last but not least, the snooker table occupies pride of place in the ground-floor back room of White’s, the oldest club in London.

Photo credit: Anthony Lejeune, White’s: The First Three Hundred Years (London: A&C Black, 1993).

(This piece was adapted from an old Twitter thread I wrote on the topic a year ago.)

All photographs, unless otherwise mentioned, are from the clubs’ websites.

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