The Junior Athenæum’s building at 116 Piccadilly, shortly after its completion in 1850, as pictured in The Builder. (Picture credit: Wikimedia Foundation.)
London’s Athenæum was dedicated to the arts and sciences, and followed a transatlantic Athenæum movement, pioneered by the club in Liverpool. Yet by the mid-Victorian period, London’s Athenæum had a thirty-year waiting list - and so the Junior Athenæum was conceived as a more responsive club, allowing an influx of young blood. But the new club never quite lived up to its lofty ambition as an institution for eminent members in the arts and sciences, and it closed after six decades.
Origins
One of the wave of “Junior” clubs launched in the 1860s (including the Junior Carlton Club founded the same year), it was intended to deal with mounting waiting lists at its Pall Mall namesake. The London correspondent of the Carlisle Journal reported on 22nd January 1864:
“A Junior Athenæum has long been talked of. The old club is not only full, but so many names are put down for ballot that a new candidate can form no reasonable hope of obtaining admission for several years.”
Not everyone was appreciative of the “Junior” moniker. The Pall Mall Gazette, considering the case of the Junior Athenæum and the Junior Carlton, asked in 1868:
“Why must these awkward names be used? Why cannot the young men invent a distinctive title for themselves?”
The Junior Athenæum was the initiative of Tory politician Philip, 5th Earl Stanhope. Stanhope was a keen antiquarian who had founded the National Portrait Gallery, been a trustee of the British Museum, presided over both the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Literary Fund; and he became the Club’s first President. He had been a member of the Athenæum since 1827. He developed the Junior Athenæum alongside George R. Wright, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, who served as the Club’s first Secretary and Librarian.
John Timbs observed in his Curiosities of London (1867) that the initial members were principally:
“members of both houses of Parliament, members of the Universities, fellows of the learned and scientific societies, or gentlemen connected with literature, science, and art.”
The device adopted by the Club was the Bird of Minerva, a copy of the reverse of the drachma of the Greeks - a rendition of the Club’s logo can be seen at the foot of this article.
The Junior Athenæum’s Piccadilly clubhouse, centre on the street corner with Down Street, pictured in the 1900s. The building on the left was the United Empire Club. (Photo credit: LondonLifeWithLiz blog.)
Building
In January 1864, the Club took up an office in St. James’s Hall on Regent Street, until it acquired more permanent premises. There was press speculation that they would open on Pall Mall in July, but this did not come to pass. In September, the Club purchased at public auction a house at 29 King Street in St. James’s, including its furniture, for use as a temporary clubhouse. It formally opened on Saturday 3rd December 1864. Already by 1866, the Club’s AGM passed a resolution that the building was too small, and that larger accommodation was needed.
In May 1868, the Club purchased a 60-year lease on the 6th Duke of Newcastle’s mansion at 116 Piccadilly, on the corner with Down Street, opening the building on Monday 16th November 1868. It was to serve as their clubhouse for the rest of their existence.
The building had been constructed in 1849-50 by Newcastle's father-in-law, Henry Thomas Hope, and was known as Hope House. It was designed by architect Thomas Leverton Donaldson, with interiors by Pierre Charles Dusillion. The building enjoyed commanding views of Green Park, with the London Sun observing in 1868 that on a clear day, the Epsom racecourse could be seen from its top floors.
Ralph Nevill wrote in London Clubs: Their History and Treasures (1911), that the building:
“was not intended for a club, having been built…at a cost of £30,000, for Mr. Henry Thomas Hope, whose initial still remains upon the elaborate cast-iron railings of French design.”
At the time of occupation, the Pall Mall Gazette thought:
“The Junior Athenaeum is to be congratulated upon having acquired so very desirable a local habitation as Mr. Hope's house.”
Additions to the rear of the Junior Athenæum, which can be seen on the left. (Picture credit: The Builder, 24 March 1888.)
In 1870 the Club was paying its landlord, the Sir Richard Sutton Estate, annual rent of £1,500 (£2.4 million in 2025), as well as annual rates of £180 (over £29,000 today).
The mansion was further expanded with the creation of a large rear extension in 1885-7, during which time its members were temporarily decanted to the Thatched House Club in St. James’s. Much of the extra space was given over to bedroom accommodation. Further renovations were carried out, well into the 1890s. Not everybody was appreciative, however, with one anonymous disgruntled member penning an angry letter to the Pall Mall Gazette, alleging “vandalism and vulgarity.”
A letter from an angry anonymous member of the Junior Athenæum. (Picture credit: Pall Mall Gazette, 30 October 1890, p. 2.)
Membership
The Club was limited to 1,000 members - the same number as the original Athenæum on its launch four decades earlier. In later years, the limit would be less of an issue, as overall membership numbers sagged.
Membership in 1892 cost £10 - around £1,700 today.
Who’s Who and Who Was Who records just 33 members between the publication’s start in 1898 and the Club’s dissolution in 1931 - a very small number for a central London club, suggesting that it struggled to draw high-profile members. (By comparison, the Junior United Service Club listed 522 members, and the United Service Club over 2,700.)
Some of its more notable names included the architect Banister Fletcher, colonial governor Sir George Grey, New Zealand premier Sir John Hall, Tory MP and journalist James Mackenzie Maclean, novelist Bertram Mitford, painter Harry Quilter, and the shipowner Henry Samman.
Throughout its existence, there was the repeated suggestion that it had lapsed into being primarily a social club, with very little fidelity to the ideas of the original Athenæum, and that most of its members lacked distinction. The ‘London Letter’ of the Waterford Chronicle observed in 1874 that there were rumours of the looming launch of a “New Athenæum”, and that:
“It is to be hoped that, if it has not so splendid a mansion, it will be more strictly true to its name than "The Junior Athenæum" has been, and still is.”
And certainly, the pastime of members - including 1880s rugby matches against other clubs - seemed less academic than their Pall Mall namesake. At the time of its closure in 1931, the Liverpool Daily Post observed:
“Despite its name, there is nothing literary in the atmosphere of the Junior Athenæum. It is a young man's club, the members of which seem to be on particularly united terms.”
Where the Club’s members featured most prominently in the press, stressing their club connections, was in civil and criminal cases; such as a Constantinople-based civil engineer convicted in 1872 of stealing a silver casket, who gave the Club as his London address when appearing in court. Another case in 1916 saw a member, stockbroker George Aston, successfully suing the Club’s Chairman Lionel A. Martin, for libel over a club communication.
The Club’s experience of World War I was noticeable only for its complete lack of wartime initiatives. Whereas other London clubs of the era launched flurries of initiatives spanning recruitment drives, nursing initiatives, troop comforts, and scrap metal collections, the Junior Athenæum simply kept on as usual throughout the war.
There was a belated attempt to move with the times - in the 1920s, the Club copied Buck’s, to have one of the first American Cocktail Bars in any London club. It was an incongruous move - the original Athenæum on Pall Mall was the last London club to have a bar, in 1961.
Dissolution
Having taken a 60-year lease on its building in 1868, the Club found that the increases to its lease from the 1920s were ever less affordable. The Club’s landlord started to advertise the building for sale. Membership had dwindled from 1,000 to just over 400, and by 1931 the situation was deemed unsustainable. The members dissolved the Club at the end of 1931, merging into the mixed-sex Wellington Club on Grosvenor Place - which itself closed down in 1939.
The Art Deco-style Athenæum Court built on the Piccadilly site in 1936-7, which remains the Athenæum Hotel to this day. (Picture credit: Condé Nast.)
Aftermath
The building on Piccadilly was subsequently sold on and demolished. It was replaced by an 11-storey Art Deco block of 150 flats completed in 1937 at a cost of £450,000 (£43.5 million today), whose name was inspired by the Club - Athenæum Court.
The management company running Athenæum Court ran into financial difficulty in the early 1970s, and sold the building to the Rank Organisation in 1971. (Like many embattled film studios in the early 1970s, the Rank Organisation was making ends meet by investing in the property sector.) Rank converted the block of flats into The Athenæum Hotel, which opened in 1973, and remains to this day. During the 1970s, Rank used its ownership to make it the hotel of choice for film celebrities staying in London for film premieres.
The hotel is currently owned by its landlord, Sir Richard Sutton Ltd, which owns much of Mayfair around Piccadilly.
The seal of the Junior Athenæum.
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