Sir Reginald Blomfield was a prolific British architect of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who left his mark on Clubland - despite not having designed or built any entirely new clubhouses.
Blomfield’s talents lay in expanding, redesigning and repurposing buildings. His career peaked at the tail-end of the 19th century boom in stately homes; and by the time Blomfield was commissioned, many of these houses built a generation or two earlier were beginning to have their design flaws become more apparent. And the urban clubhouses - often conceived as stately homes built in the middle of London - had exactly the same problems as these stately homes. Blomfield’s experience was therefore indispensable. He was to overhaul three iconic clubhouses along Pall Mall - two of which still stand today.
Sir Reginald Blomfield. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Foundation.)
Biography
Blomfield had been born in Devon in 1856, the third of eleven children; his father was an Anglican vicar, and his mother was the daughter of the Bishop of London. He rejected any idea of a church career, however; after Haileybury, he graduated in classics from Exeter College, Oxford. Inititally dreaming of becoming a sculptor, in 1881 he apprenticed to his architect uncle Sir Arthur W. Blomfield; and in 1884 he launched his own practice. By the 1890s, he was a successful architect in his own right, closely identified with the Arts and Crafts movement, and with colleagues including William Morris and Richard Norman Shaw.
Blomfield worked on hundreds of buildings. He was at his most productive in the Edwardian era, when his practice was booming, specialising in renovating and updating country houses. After the First World War, with country houses in decline, this side of the business faded, to be replaced with another mainstay, designing war memorials in the 1920s. His practice slowed in the 1930s, as he entered semi-retirement. Blomfield died in 1942, at the age of 86.
United University Club
Blomfield’s first work in Clubland was a radical redesign of the United University Club, at a time when the Club was renegotiating an extension to its lease. It would be Blomfield’s longest ongoing relationship with any building.
While at this stage in his career he had never worked on clubs before, Blomfield already had extensive experience of designing educational institutions. He had built the Bradby Memorial Hall of his old school, Haileybury; the art school in Hertford; Queen Anne’s School in Caversham; St. Edmund’s School in Canterbury; Hillside School in Godalming; Blundell’s School in Tiverton; the new buildings of Sherborne School for Girls in Dorset; and had designed most of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Blomfield’s background in designing schools suited the Club - its original architect in the 1820s, William Wilkins, had been recruited on the strength of his having designed Downing College, Cambridge.
But Blomfield also benefitted from an all-important family connection to the Club - its official architect from 1878 was his uncle, Sir Arthur W. Blomfield - the same uncle who had first given him an entry into his trade. However, in the 21 years Blomfield Senior was in post until his death in 1899, the Club commissioned him to make only minor alterations.
Aubrey Sykes’ 1975 watercolour of Blomfield’s rebuild of the United University Club. (Picture credit: John Thole, The Oxford and Cambridge Clubs in London (Henley: Alfred Waller, 1992), f. 1.)
However, with the renewal of its lease in 1905, the Club envisioned something far more extensive: a complete rebuild. It needed to use the same (106 feet by 53 feet) floor plan as Wilkins’ Regency building, but far taller, making greater use of the space. The mansard roof and new floral friezes by Henry Alfred Pegram gave it the feel of a French chateau, which contrasted with the English country house feel of the previous building. It also made the most of Blomfield’s love of arts and crafts interiors. John Thole noted:
“The Club therefore went into suspended animation for eighteen months while the house was rebuilt.”
The new clubhouse opened in 1906, to a mixed reception from members. There was some controversy over “phase two” of Blomfield’s plan, which provided bedroom accommodation for the first time. Across a series of EGMs, a membership rebellion argued that the addition of bedrooms would fundamentally change the character of the Club - and for the worse. After a series of tight votes, the rebellion was over-ruled, and Blomfield eventually finished his attic bedrooms in 1907.
The expanded front of the United University Club’s clubhouse, which can be seen from Suffolk Street today. The sections on the left were Blomfield’s 1924 additions; while the central and right-hand sections were his original 1905-6 clubhouse. (Photo credit: author’s own photograph, 2025.)
Blomfield was to revisit the building for two more expansions. In 1924, the Club acquired the neighbouring numbers 2, 3 and 4 Suffolk Street, to the north. This more than doubled the clubhouse’s floorplan, and Blomfield oversaw this expansion, which created a new main entrance.
Blomfield was to return to the building one final time in 1938, to design an annexe to the east, backing onto Whitcomb Street at the rear of the Club. This was built in 1939-40, and was to be Blomfield’s final work as an architect.
Oxford and Cambridge Club
Concurrently with his original work on the United University Club, Blomfield was engaged in a 1906 redesign of the Oxford & Cambridge Club’s Pall Mall clubhouse.
It had been constructed seven decades earlier, in a design by British Museum architect Sir Robert Smirke, aided (and eventually succeeded after his death) by his brother, Sydney Smirke. Its Classical-style design was popular in the clubhouses in the mid-19th century (as per Decimus Burton’s Athenæum completed in 1830, and Charles Octavius Parnell & Frederick Smith’s original Army & Navy Club completed in 1851). But by the Edwardian era, it was becoming apparent that there were shortcomings compared to the newest clubs, both in the scale of refreshment offered, and in asethetics.
Smirke’s main staircase in the Oxford & Cambridge Club, embedding the changes by Blomfield. (Photo credit: Oxford & Cambridge Club website.)
Blomfield largely left the Oxford & Cambridge Club’s exterior intact, but his changes to the interior included an overhaul of the Club’s main staircase by Smirke, its being surrounded with cladded marble panelling, and the addition of a tripartite window at the back to illuminate it, with gilded highlights such as ornate lamps. Indeed, beyond the staircase, gilt became much more apparent throughout the clubhouse, echoing the gilt style that the Ritz Hotel had popularised a decade earlier, appealing to nouveaux riches sensibilities.
Blomfield’s work here would take six years to be fully realised, with the Club working the building project into partial closures rather than agreeing to close the entire clubhouse. The last phase of construction, completed in 1912, was the addition of attic storeys, which gave the Club scope for bedroom accommodation for the first time.
Carlton Club
Blomfield’s work on the Carlton Club was much admired at the time - but none of it survives.
He was initially hired by the Club in 1920 to build its ladies’ annexe at 4 Carlton Gardens. This was an adjoining building, behind the main clubhouse on Pall Mall, which was used to entertain ladies as guests, without admitting them to the main clubhouse.
So impressed was the Carlton Club with Smirke’s work, that they entrusted him with an even bigger project.
Like the Oxford & Cambridge Club further up Pall Mall, the Carlton Club had been the work of Sir Robert and Sydney Smirke. Sir Robert, assisted by his younger brother, had designed the original 1830s Pall Mall clubhouse. When that was eclipsed by its neighbouring rival the Reform Club, completed in the 1840s, the Carlton Club had taken the drastic step of demolishing its own building, and then commissioned Sydney Smirke to build an expanded Carlton Club on the site. It began in 1846-8, and was only completed in 1854-6.
Contemporary newsreel of the 1922 Carlton Club meeting. Note the clearly crumbling stonework. (Film credit: Pathé News.)
By the early 1920s, the Carlton Club’s mid-Victorian stonework façade was crumbling; this is extremely obvious in newsreel footage of the fateful 1922 Carlton Club meeting which brought down Lloyd George’s coalition government.
Blomfield was therefore engaged to comprehensively reface the Carlton Club, using Portland stone cladding which embraced the original building underneath, while leaving it internally intact. He carried out the work from 1923 to 1924. It was in a style which was highly fashionable at the time - and can be compared to his United University Club - though more recent appraisals have been mixed. Barry Phelps wrote in his 1982 history of the Carlton:
“Sir Reginald’s façade had a classical design of great elegance but it lacked the brash self-confidence of Smirke’s.”
Certainly, it lacked the Italianate idiosyncracy of Smirke’s design, and could have been mistaken for any number of government offices or ministries nearby.
Blomfield’s 1923-4 alterations to the façade of the Carlton Club, pictured in 1927. This remained the Club’s appearance until 1940. (Photo credit: London Town, Described and Illustrated (London: Homeland Association, 1927).)
None of Blomfield’s work on the Carlton Club on Pall Mall, or its ladies’ annexe on Carlton Gardens, survives. Both buildings were bombed out in 1940, and were eventually demolished in the aftermath.
However, Blomfield’s other Clubland work on Pall Mall remains largely intact. The Oxford & Cambridge Club received a sympathetic restoration by Paul Vonberg in 2001; while the present use of the former United University Club building as the University of Notre Dame’s London campus ensures that it is also cared for. Both remain Listed buildings.
Further reading
Reginald T. Blomfield, Memoirs of an Architect (London: Macmilan, 1932).
M. S. Briggs, revised by Richard A. Fellows, ‘Sir Reginald Theodore Blomfield’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, rev. 2009).
Richard A. Fellows, Sir Reginald Blomfield: An Edwardian Architect (New York: Zwemmer, 1985).
Francesca Herrick, A Guide to the Art Collections of the Oxford and Cambridge Club (London: Oxford and Cambridge Club, 2012).
John Thole, The Oxford and Cambridge Clubs in London (Henley: Alfred Waller, 1992).
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Index
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