The Clubs of Edinburgh

Edinburgh has one of the world’s oldest club cultures. As the centre of the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh benefitted hugely from the associational culture of the era, and the 2021 academic monograph Association and Enlightenment: Scottish Clubs and Societies, 1700-1830, notes that the city’s clubs go at least as far back as the short-lived Easy Club of 1712-5, its name selected to check “all unruly and disturbing behaviour among its members.” Yet like most cities, the churn of clubs has been considerable, and few of these earliest clubs survive.

The dining room of the New Club. (Photo credit: The Scotsman.)

Today, Edinburgh’s club with the oldest roots is the (paradoxically-named) New Club, which was founded in 1787. Initially having a peripatetic existence (its first meeting place, in Bayle’s Tavern on Shakespeare Square has long since vanished), it eventually settled on its present site in 1837. A separate University Club, founded in 1864, amalgamated into the New Club in 1953.

The New Club’s present clubhouse. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Foundation.)

A controversial decision was the 1967 demolition of the original 1830s Italianate clubhouse by noted Scottish architect William Burn, with 1850s additions by David Bryce; and its replacement with the current clubhouse by Alan Reiach, Eric Hall & Partners two years later, housing a blend of period Victorian furniture and artwork, with contemporary Swedish furniture. Visitors can be disconcerted by the approach, via a non-descript door between a high street ATM cash machine, and a branch of the Ann Summers sex shop. The building is Listed, and offers a prominent view of Edinburgh Castle from its prime Princes Street location. Today, it has some 2,200 members.

The Scottish Arts Club. (Photo credit: The Edinburgh Reporter.)

More discreet is the Scottish Arts Club, dating to 1873. This was originally founded as the Scottish Artists’ Club by Queen Victoria’s sculptor Sir John Steell, and the then-President of the Royal Scottish Academy, Sir George Harvey. It has been based on Rutland Square since 1894, when it also changed its name to reflect the widening interest base of its members, just as it began to admit lay members who were not practising artists. Its clubhouse maintains an art gallery, alongside the more typical club facilities. It has around 3,500 members.

The members’ library of the Royal Scots Club. (Photo credit: HeadBox.)

The city’s main military club is the Royal Scots Club, dating to 1919. This was founded at the instigation of Princess Mary, the only daughter of King George V, in her capacity as Colonel-in-Chief of The Royal Scots (The Royal Regiment), to provide a club for officers of the regiment returning home from the Great War. After an initial stint based in some temporary huts on St. Andrew Square, it moved to its present Georgian clubhouse on Abercromby Place over 1921-2; and it now combines a club with a public-facing hotel, making it easy for non-members to both visit and stay. The Club today has over 2,000 members. The city’s Caledonian Club, originally formed as the Caledonian Services Club in 1826, merged into the Royal Scots Club in 2002.

Over-Seas House on Princes Street, former site of the Royal Over-Seas League, Edinburgh. (Photo credit: David M. Gray, flickr.)

The 21st century has not been kind to the clubs of Edinburgh, with several high-profile closures. The Royal Scottish Automobile Club had been established in Edinburgh 1899, just two years after its London counterpart, but it moved to Glasgow early in its existence; and a century later it was ailing, closing its clubhouse in 2002. And the Royal Over-Seas League maintained an Edinburgh clubhouse from 1930, just a few doors along Princes Street from the New Club, until its closure due to financial pressures in 2018. The building is now a hotel, named after the former club.

The bar and restaurant of the Gleneagles Townhouse. (Photo credit: Gleneagles Townhouse website.)

This has not stopped one new arrival to the city. The Gleneagles Townhouse is a proprietary club, owned by the management of the Highland hotel of that name. Its opening was delayed by the pandemic, but finally went ahead in 2022. As with modern hotel-clubs found in London and New York, it combines a public hotel with a members’ lounge. It has several hundred members.

Wallace & Rendell point to Scotland’s club culture having been an all-male world prior to 1800; but today, all of Edinburgh’s private members’ clubs are mixed-sex. The New Club was originally gentlemen-only, but the 1969 clubhouse was designed to accommodate women, albeit on a segregated basis, with the creation of a ladies’ side - 1970 saw the creation of an Associate Member category for the wives of members, though women remained banned from using the main staircase until 1998, with full membership not being offered to all women until 2010. The Scottish Arts Club and the Royal Scots Club both opened up full membership to women in 1982, while the Gleneagles Townhouse has been mixed-sex since it opened in 2022.

The city maintains a much broader associational culture beyond the private members’ clubs, with institutions run along club lines such as the Royal Society of Edinburgh, dating to 1783, and abundant sporting establishments such as the Grange Club, and the Drumsheugh Baths Club; and then there is a litany of historic but informal societies without premises, including dining societies including Puffin’s Club and the Aesculapian Club, or the Royal Caledonian Hunt. Even a commercial venture like the Scottish Malt Whisky Society maintains a clubhouse with tasting rooms on Queen Street. Edinburgh has clubbism suffused through its culture.

Further reading

• Harry A. Cockburn, A History of the New Club, Edinburgh, 1787-1937 (London: W. & R. Chambers, 1938).

• Morrice McCrae (ed.), The New Club - A History (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2004).

• Duncan McDougall, A History of the Royal Scots Club (War Memorial) (Glasgow: J. R. Reid, 1999).

• Roddy Martine, Not for Glory Nor Riches: One Hundred Years of the Royal Scots Club (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2019).

• Charles-Louis de Noüe (with Serge Gleizes), ‘New Club’, in Gentlemen’s Clubs in Europe (Paris: Editions du Palais, 2022 - trans. into English, from the original French text, Clubs & Cercles en Europe, 2020), pp. 92-105.

• Mark C. Wallace and Jane Rendell (eds), Association and Enlightenment: Scottish Clubs and Societies, 1700-1830 (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 2021).