The hotel-club: Victorian comeback, or a blight on Clubland?

The Curtain Club in Shoreditch - a hip hotel-club which opened to huge fanfare in 2016 - and quietly closed down in 2023.

There has been a noticeable boom in recent years in hotels choosing to open clubrooms.

This trend is supply-led rather than demand-led. What I mean by this is that although club memberships remain in high demand, the boom in these new establishments has not been led by members themselves “clubbing together” to raise the considerable capital required to set up new member-owned clubs, in the Victorian way. Instead, it has been led by investors - typically in private equity - taking the lead in funding a string of proprietary clubs, run for profit, and hoping to maximise returns. New memberships have then been offered to members, rather than being initiated by founder members.

New Clubs

A small number of these for-profit proprietary clubs have flourished. Most have not. Although there tends to be extensive press coverage of new clubs opening, it is much rarer for there to be press coverage of “new” clubs that abruptly - and quietly - close down (although it is a phenomenon I have been tracking for some years).

My own data suggests that the average lifespan of a ‘new’ club is three years. Indeed, with many of the UK examples being structured as limited companies, it is not difficult to consult public-domain filings on Companies House. There, one finds that it is far from unusual for new clubs to rack up debts ranging from £23 million to £78 million, within some 18-24 months of opening. On an annual turnover of, say, £5-7 million (and with no guarantee of turning a profit on that turnover - and if there is a profit, it rarely exceeding 10% of turnover), it is all too easy to see how insolvency is a very real risk in those unpredictable, capital-intensive, early years.

That is not to say that long-established “old” clubs are in any way immune to financial difficulties. But the historic clubs which have survived are a self-selecting sample, that have already had to weather financial storms to endure. The reasons why they flourish are complicated, and something I may cover elsewhere.

It is worth tackling the common misconception that clubs - particularly the achingly fashionable ones - are a licence to print money. This is not so, and it has rarely ever been so. In fact, they are often an excellent way to lose large sums of money in the long run. They frequently depend on what would be regarded in the UK as “bail-outs” (though are more tactfully called “assessments” in the United States). It should always be remembered that around 90% of London clubs have closed down - a statistic I have seen reflected elsewhere. (For instance, this is also seen among the historic clubs of Spain.)

The United Club and Hotel: The original template

Nor is it the case that the hotel-club is anything necessarily new. Far from it, the earliest example is to be found in the heart of St. James’s in the mid-Victorian era: The United Hotel at numbers 19-25 Charles Street (since renamed Charles II Street, running from St. James’s Square to Haymarket) housed the United Club from its opening in 1866, until 1879. The Club’s original member-owned incarnation had promptly gone bust amidst the members’ ceaseless demands for unfunded luxury - a common fate of Victorian clubs - and an 1868 restructuring had seen the club and clubhouse handed over to a newly-created company, the United Club and Hotel Limited, backed by 3,000 shares of £5 each, creating a share capital of £15,000 - and making the new hotel-club answerable to its shareholders.

The United Club and Hotel can be seen on this 1874 Ordnance Survey Map of St. James’s (sheet VII.73), showing its position on Charles Street. The Club enjoyed a private entrance to Her Majesty’s Theatre next door, and had an entrance to Opera Arcade, which led to Pall Mall. (Picture credit: National Library of Scotland.)

The ever-entrepreneurial United Hotel even housed other clubs, at number 24: there was the United Clergy and Laity Club, a new Anglican establishment which stood in contrast to the unthemed social club found in the much larger United Club. But it was also a somewhat incongruous pairing in a hotel, and closed in 1878. Shorter-lived was the Militia and Yeomanry Club, a pre-existing club taken in, but which did not survive for long.

The United Club(s) had almost exactly the same offer as a modern-day hotel-club: the overheads were already covered by the hotel needing to establish, furnish and staff a (public-facing) restaurant and bedrooms; and this was supplemented by the provision of a dedicated members-only lounge. Members were also offered discount rates on the hotel bedrooms.

From the United Hotel’s point of view, this was a perfectly sensible use of space. A hotel typically thrives on 90% occupancy 70% of the time, or 70% occupancy 90% of the time. For the sacrifice of the equivalent of two hotel suites as a designated member area, paying subscriptions could be generated among the 500 paying members, while the hotel did not appreciably need to provide many more amenities, beyond servicing a members’ lounge.

As an arrangement, it greatly suited the hotel - as it does modern hotels. And the hotel-club was initially run very profitably, declaring dividends of 10% to shareholders. The offer to members seems to me more questionable.

Despite this almost guaranteed money-spinner, the United Hotel had a troubled history. There was an attempt at giving all members a stake in the Club - each member’s subscription bought them 2 shares in the Company. But the combined stake of the entire membership only added up to a third of the stock, so the Club was two-thirds owned by external shareholders, creating tensions.

And before the new company even launched, the Club Secretary wrote ominously to several national newspapers:

SIR - I beg to inform you, for the satisfaction of the public, that the accident to-day at the United Hotel, has not been of a serious nature to the building, having been confined entirely to the ground floor, and that the business is carried on as usual. The directors much regret the injury sustained by some of the domestics of the establishment. - I am, Sir, your very obedient servant,

A. McNAUGHTAN, Secretary.

Charles-street, St. James's, Oct. 19. [1868]

In 1874, the Club and Company Secretary, William Hennessy, was prosecuted for forging a company cheque with intent to defraud; the Club and Hotel’s Managing Director Martin Tupper Hood testified against him. He was found guilty, and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. (Lest any wider inference be wrongly drawn, it should be pointed out that for-profit clubs were apparently no more or less inclined to host malfeasance than their member-owned counterparts - OldBailey.org has plenty of case studies at both kinds of institution.) The United Hotel ended up closing in 1879, and with it, the Club, after the landlord, G. H. T. Wheatly, ended up serving a winding-up petition over unpaid rent.

London’s Hotel Boom

The United Club was far from being a one-off: I could point to a dozen other historic templates for this business model - though it appears to have been the first London club combining a public-facing hotel with a members-only lounge area, and a shared staff and company servicing the two.

Much later, Victorian London underwent a hotel boom. This was led by the opening of London’s Savoy Hotel in 1889, and Ritz Hotel in 1896. Consequently, in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, the aesthetic of these luxury hotels began to prove tremendously fashionable. The grand staircase of Buckingham Palace was redecorated in the Ritz style of white with a gold trim. Celebrity hotel chefs were sought out for their expertise and cookbooks. (A generation earlier, it had been the clubs which had provided celebrity chefs such as Alexis Soyer and Louis-Eustache Ude.) Club servants, and particularly concierges, were sought for their hospitality experience (where a generation earlier, it had again been the clubs which were often the first port of call for those seeking trained staff).

Clubs not only fell behind in the hospitality trade from the Edwardian era onwards - they began to become noticeably (and consciously) more hotel-like. This trend continued in the inter-war era, and clubs mimicking hotel service and hotel presentation was increasingly seen to be the latest thing in luxury.

This was less pronounced in the half-century or so following World War II, because of the long decline of London Clubland. In increasingly straitened circumstances, they did not have the money to emulate hotels (all too often, they did not have the money to do anything at all), and the Victorian/Edwardian/inter-war hotel phase was put down to a passing fad.

Luxury vs Clubbability: A Tension

This changed considerably with the resurgence of modern clubs since the 1980s and 1990s. These were businesses which prided themselves on the highest standards of customer care bordering on pampering, and which often boasted amenities considerably more luxurious than could be offered by historic clubs whose ageing infrastructure had not caught up. They were very much responsible for raising the quality of offerings mong clubs old and new. And while the first wave of “new” clubs in the 1980s were seldom hotel-clubs, in the scramble for new clubs, the lure of the hotel-club model has often proved irresistible to investors.

Hotel-clubs in London (and elsewhere) are now ubiquitous. Sometimes a pre-existing hotel has woken up to the wheeze of designating a suite as a members’ area. Sometimes a new hotel is conceived of as an “experimental” hotel-club hybrid. Sometimes a pre-existing club makes its bedrooms publicly available, or invests in a hotel.

Yet many of these hotel-clubs - which have exploded in the last decade, and show no sign of slowing down - also pose a challenge to how we think of clubs.

The main challenge, as I see it, lies in their being rooted in luxury and hospitality, rather than conviviality and membership. These are important distinctions. And they have very different implications for a member’s rights and expectations in their own club.

We like to think of the ideal club having it all. Yet all clubs represent choices and trade-offs. In its purest form, a club rooted in luxury and hospitality seeks to fulfil the member’s whims, however trivial. That is what a high-end hospitality business does: It encourages the member to place their own interests before the club - and if they cannot get the satisfaction required from the business, then in a crowded marketplace they can find another club more to their liking.

By contrast, a club rooted in conviviality and membership emphasises community, and other members. It is a club built on compromise. These are the more traditional clubs, going back centuries. You may not always like what is on the menu, you may think the member you spoke to over dinner yesterday was talking out of sheer ignorance, and you may find the dining room looking a trifle faded these days. But it is your club, and you are happy to remain a member, even if it involves a trade-off. That mindset is quintessentially convivial, and gets to the core of what it is to be a club member. It is also inconceivable to the member steeped in the hospitality-centred club, who wants everything done their way, right now, and is not prepared to compromise. And this has far deeper implications than members being more demanding. It dramatically affects “clubbable” behaviour.

If I sound instinctively sceptical of the hotel-club model, it is because of the question, “Who benefits?” The members certainly have less say in the direction of their club than they would in a member-owned club; often, they have none at all. Yet neither do they enjoy the confidence in the “benevolent dictatorship” of a trusted, high-profile proprietor, as found in the more successful proprietary clubs, where a lack of democracy and accountability is cheeerfully waved away in exchange for the implicit trust in the proprietor’s good sense and good taste; the nature of modern hospitality makes it almost inevitable that the hotel-club is funded by (and often run by) a consortium, seeking to emulate the look and feel of a members’ club - but with neither its governance nor its soul. The hotel-club is a collaboration, but one in which the member is likely to be left voiceless. Investors and shareholders are likely to drown out members, unless the members are the investors and shareholders. And sooner or later, this leaves members almost inevitably asking the question no club management ever wants posed: “Why am I a member?”

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