London’s New Social Clubs Hardly for the Old Boys

In retrospect, the junky army-green jalopy and silver Mercedes limousine parked in tandem outside Home House offered the first clue that there is something different about this exclusive club.

Inside the 18th century townhouse, the book-lined bar has the requisite sculptured busts and stuffed deer. All well and good.

But what’s this beyond the high-back leather chairs and needlepoint pillows? In one corner of the bar area, a young man in his shirt sleeves has opened a laptop on the coffee table. In another, two men and a woman are flagrantly engaged in a once-forbidden activity--business talk.

“We’ve definitely got 24,000 pounds available to us,” one is heard to say.

Money discussions, women members, informal dress. In this mother city of “gentlemen’s clubs,” the 1 1/2-year-old Home House belongs to a new generation of members-only establishments that break centuries-old rules of behavior.

Equally snobby in their own way, these new clubs nonetheless represent a new British society that is more open and upwardly mobile than it used to be, and moving toward a U.S.-style meritocracy. The clubs are hipper, with better food and more eclectic memberships than their predecessors on St. James’s and Pall Mall streets, and they provide a window into London’s new upper classes.

“This is an old house and the appearance is old clubland, but it is new clubland,” said Home House member Peter York, 52, a management consultant and social commentator. “All human life is here. It’s wildly heterogeneous. You can’t predict who’s here. Except for those kids.”

“Those kids,” of course, are dot-com entrepreneurs more concerned with where they are going than where they came from. They inhabit a world in which money counts for at least as much as background, and where cool matters more than propriety.

If the old boys’ clubs were filled with Madeira-sipping knights from the shires nodding off by the fireplace, these are bars with a buzz airing CNN and MTV to the chattering classes--members of the media, design, film and dot-com worlds and a smattering of aristocrats--who savor Absolut vodka and Cuban mojitos.

But new or old, getting into one of these clubs still depends on who you are and whom you know. Applicants have to be nominated by two members and approved by a club committee.

Soho House, opened in 1995 for West End actors and filmmakers, has 2,500 members and a waiting list of 1,400. “But if there are particular people who want to get in, the committee will consider them,” owner Nick Jones said.

Old Clubs Date Back to the 16th Century

London’s traditional English gentlemen’s clubs, dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries, numbered 200 in their heyday at the turn of the century and still count more than 40, with a few thousand “toffs” who make lunch or dinner at the club a regular part of their week.

They were founded as places for like-minded men--and men only, until very recently--to meet and discuss ideas, but certainly not the tawdry topics of business and money. (They have abandoned the practice of boiling coins before giving them as change to members.)

They divided loosely according to political line, and each had its own style. White’s, founded a year before the Bank of England, was a place for Tories to pick prime ministers and for MI6 spy chiefs to plot. It is one of the few that still exclude women.

Brooks’s, originally for the liberal Whigs, has had 13 prime ministers as members and--if further proof of its social standing is needed--was the target of an Irish Republican Army bomb in 1974. The Garrick Club, founded in 1831 for the leading actors and literary figures of its day, included Thackeray and Dickens in its ranks.

A good club, author Anthony Lejeune wrote in “The Gentlemen’s Clubs of London,” “should be a refuge from the vulgarity of the outside world, a reassuringly fixed point, the echo of a more civilized way of living, a place where [as was once said of an Oxford college] people still prefer a silver salt cellar which doesn’t pour to a plastic one which does.”

But as London has grown into a cosmopolitan city and international financial center for the 21st century, so its elites have expanded and become more heterogeneous. The princes and viscounts have been joined by celebrities and the new rich, from singers and soccer stars to media moguls and dot-com execs.

The 100-most-invited list of the high-society Tatler magazine puts Madonna and her director boyfriend Guy Ritchie ahead of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles. Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of Rupert, and her PR boyfriend Matthew Freud beat out Prince Andrew as favored dinner guests. And fashion designer Stella McCartney, daughter of Paul, places far ahead of Lord and Lady Rothschild or raconteur Claus von Bulow.

And so it goes at the new social clubs and, similarly, at the newest members-only bars. Home House and the West End Met Bar both were quick to boast Madonna’s patronage. Chinawhite, another membership nightclub, draws Prince Andrew and prizefighter Lennox Lewis to its tables.

All of these places bar photographers and autograph-seekers and subscribe to the principle that if you are excited to be sitting next to a celebrity, you don’t belong there.

No one seems to have counted the new generation members-only clubs. It seems that the hippest amount to about a dozen, counting dining clubs and nightclubs, and range from staid to raucous. They cater to different elites with widely varied interests, and if, as was said, you could judge a man by the company he keeps, you still can tell a member of the elite by the club he--or she--joins.

‘Quite Hedonistic . . . and Open-Minded’

The new generation of clubs began, in effect, in Soho. Taking its name from the famous Groucho Marx line that he wouldn’t belong to a club that would have him, the Groucho Club was founded in 1985 as a home away from home for the media, film and publishing crowds that would not have been admitted to the old gentlemen’s clubs--had they wanted to join. Its style is decidedly modern, its art more Damien Hirst than George Stubbs, and its membership is heavily female.

The Boisdale in Belgravia appeals to a more conservative crowd, although it aims to be eclectic. A restaurant open to the public, Boisdale serves venison for the old palate, sauteed squid for the new and is home to two membership clubs, one for cigar and jazz aficionados, another for debaters.

A good club, founder Ranald MacDonald said, is about a good blend. People should feel as comfortable in black tie as in jeans at his claret-colored establishment and share his love of Cuban cigars and jazz. A taste for single malt whiskey helps.

“We’re not a set. It’s more an attitude toward life. That attitude is politically incorrect, enjoying everything we should enjoy--to excess, when necessary,” he said. “Quite hedonistic, old-fashioned and open-minded.”

The son of a Scottish clan leader and member of White’s since he was 18, the 36-year-old in suspenders and a tie is well positioned to distinguish between London’s new and old elites.

There has always been new money in Britain, MacDonald said, noting that King Edward II was given 13 godparents when he was born in the 13th century, all of whom had received their titles within the previous decade.

Still, he added, there is no denying that the class structure of Britain has “changed beyond recognition.” The landed gentry no longer controls wealth and political power nor sets the standards for manners.

“That class has lost its foothold and been discredited. The accent which was the accent of power and influence doesn’t open doors and might close them,” MacDonald said in that same upper-class accent.

Still, he adds, there is a discernible difference between new and old money.

“New money has more enthusiasm and tends to be more vulgar,” he said. “Most of our richest customers don’t spend a lot of money on wine.”

But new money does.

“They haven’t had the experience of how easily money disappears,” he said. “When you’ve been looking after it for generations, you’re more careful with it.”

At Soho House, owner Jones isn’t interested in old money. He offers his film and acting crowd a 25-seat screening theater, meeting rooms with video facilities and a series of bars and dining rooms for congenial talk.

The club offers plugs and computer ports for laptop convenience but restricts irritating mobile telephone use to the narrow hallways, which consequently can be quite crowded.

“The more moneyed people are, the more ghastly they are,” Jones said with a smile. As a successful club owner and restaurateur, clearly he can’t mind too much.

“This is very classless. In the very old-English clubs, it’s ‘What school did you go to and what did your father do?’ What brings this together is like-mindedness,” he said.

That like-mindedness does breed its own style of conformity, however: a preponderance of black T-shirts and stylish specs on the diners; quiche and guacamole on the menu. “If you come in here in a suit, you really do look out of place,” Jones said. “You get the odd City person [from London’s financial district], but if they come in groups of eight, you might as well have eight army officers in uniform.”

$1,800 to Join; $1,800 Annual Dues

There is no uniform at Home House, where the winnowing is done American-style, more by price than like-mindedness. It costs an average of about $1,800 to join and the same again each year. (Soho House charges $150 to join and $600 a year.)

Home House takes its name from the original owner of the Portman Square building, Lady Hume, whose aristocratic pronunciation made it sound as if she was saying “Home.”

Last summer, Home House hosted a party for First Tuesday, a group that brings dot-com idealists together with venture capitalists.

“When we started First Tuesday, I didn’t really have an office so I held all my meetings at Home House over breakfast, lunch and dinner,” said co-founder and marketing chief Julie Meyer. “I had my phone and my PC, and Home House was the launching pad.”

Such claims would send shudders up the spines of members at the likes of White’s. But in the new generation of clubs, business is no more scorned than are members of the new elites.

“At Groucho’s I see everyone I know,” said York, the commentator and Home House member. “Here I see quite a lot of people I don’t know, as well as those whom I can’t completely identify.”