The Arts Club

Founded in 1863 by a group that included Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope among its early members, the Arts Club has occupied its current home at 40 Dover Street since 1894, an eighteenth-century Mayfair townhouse just north of the Ritz that was rebuilt after significant Blitz damage and given a full renovation in 2011 that modernised the club without erasing its character entirely.

The original idea, a meeting place for London’s writers, painters and thinkers to gather away from more staid Victorian institutions, still shapes the collection on the walls, which includes genuinely significant pieces rather than decorative filler bought purely to match the furnishings, and the club maintains a sixteen-room hotel alongside its dining rooms, bars and members’ spaces for anyone staying over.

Membership now draws heavily from finance, media and the arts in rather more commercial forms than its nineteenth-century founders might immediately recognise, and the club functions today as much as a networking venue for London’s professional classes as it does a haunt for painters and poets, which is a reasonable enough evolution for a club that has survived more than 160 years of changing tastes. A regular programme of talks, exhibitions and music events in the club’s basement space keeps some of the original cultural remit alive alongside the dining rooms and bars.

Food and drink are handled with the polish expected of a serious private members’ club, though as with most clubs of this kind, the building and the access it grants matter rather more to members than any single dish on the current menu, which changes seasonally without becoming a talking point in its own right. The upstairs hotel rooms are booked mainly by members’ guests rather than marketed to the wider public.

The honest caveat: without a member’s sponsorship there is no way in at all, and the crowd, while cultured in name and origin, can feel more corporate networking than genuinely bohemian in practice on any given evening. That gap between the founding myth and the present-day room is worth knowing before building up expectations from the history alone.