In my idler moments, sprawled on a chaise lounge, flipping playing cards into a top hat, I’ve taken to wondering what it takes to be blackballed from a London private members’ club. The Cambridge dictionary defines blackballing as ‘to vote against allowing someone to be a member of an organisation or group.’ The equivalent, then, of an upper-class ASBO. To be blackballed in London’s clubland of Mayfair and St. James’s traditionally meant being the perpetrator of the kind of behaviour that today would result in nothing more than a quizzical look from the barman in a branch of Wetherspoons. But definitions of rebarbative behaviour are different in W1.
The storied members’ clubs of Boodles, White’s and Pratt’s et al keep their counsel when it comes to details. Yet, from anecdotal stories heard sotto voce over the years, it would seem that blackball-worthy transgressions include sending your children to state school, swearing while in charge of a billiard cue, and admitting to an admiration for Angela Rayner.
The Arts Club on Dover Street has a long tradition of being a little more laissez-faire about such things. It was founded in 1863 by an amateur artist named Arthur Lewis, the ringleader of a singing group called The Moray Minstrels, and a member of the Artists’ Rifle Corps. It was with his comrades in mind that he set about establishing a club. Charles Dickens joined straight away, The Arts Club becoming his new home-from-home after the novelist left The Garrick in a huff following a row with William Makepeace Thackeray. Perhaps Dickens realised that he’d never invent a character as seductively corrupt as Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp.
The club’s first chairman was Tom Brown’s Schooldays author Thomas Hughes, and early members included cartoonist-writer George du Maurier, émigré painter John McNeill Whistler, plus Dante Gabriel Rossetti and almost every other leading member of the saturnine Pre-Raphaelites. The club’s reputation for being less stuffy than its rivals owes, perhaps, to the tale of Algernon Charles Swinburne, a long-forgotten writer whose novels concerned themselves with sadomasochism and Sapphic affairs.
Leaving the club one afternoon, Swinburne couldn’t find his hat. Presuming it had been stolen, he proceeded to gather all the other hats that had been left in the cloakroom, before stamping all over them. It was only mid-tantrum that the hall porter reminded Swinburne that he had arrived without his hat that day. The Arts Club eventually blackballed Swinburne, but the episode demonstrated that the club would only do so if you were to take things as far as destroying other people’s clothes.
After finally admitting its first female member in 1981 (White’s and The Beefsteak Club still don’t permit female members, even in 2025), The Arts Club went further by allowing non-members over the threshold, as long as they’d booked a room in one of the upstairs rooms for the night.
Today’s accommodation is no afterthought. My bijou suite had the feel of the 1920s private quarters of an MGM studio executive; all the way down to klieg-style lamps and Art Deco armchairs with wooden armrests wide enough to rest three whisky sours on. The skylight in the marble-saturated bathroom meant I could hear the rain. It was early afternoon, and I felt warmly cocooned inside this fifth-floor sanctum. Knowing that the black tulip-like mouthpiece of the vintage telephone on the desk was unlikely to ring, I leafed my way through a Cecil Beaton retrospective that, never mind being a coffee table book, was big enough to be the coffee table itself.
The Arts Club dress code is fairly axiomatic. Gentlemen are not required to wear jackets, and the doorman will only intervene if you’re attired in what the rules state are ‘overly ripped jeans’ or tracksuits. In essence, unless you’re dressed for the gym, skatepark or building site, you’ll be granted entrance.
Wandering around the club, I applauded whoever fixed the lighting. The luminescence of a place has a direct corollary to the extent we feel we can relax – it’s one of the reasons we hate airports and love old pubs – and The Arts Club is a homely warren of amber-lit boltholes, snugs, vaults and corners, where intimacies can be shared, egos soothed and confessions assuaged (essential in the picayune world of arts and media).
The notion still clings, like gravy fumes to a starched shirt, that the food served within Mayfair and St. James’s members’ club is a paean to boarding school dinners of the 1950s, all boiled meat and spotted dick. The Arts Club said goodbye to all that years ago; with Kyubi serving exceptional sushi and sashimi on one floor, and Ofelia offering genuinely sensational truffle tagliolini (with the fungus munificently sheared rather than frugally shaved on top) and spinach and ricotta ravioli that bested anything I’ve eaten in the trattorias of Cremona.
Directly across the street (you can dash over in your slippers, if you wish) is Lanserhof, those holistic gurus from Austria at the vanguard of cryotherapy and diagnostics check-ups, with whom The Arts Club has a partnership. I succumbed to a 20-minute ‘Immune Support’ vitamin infusion. It was an intravenous supercharge that left me feeling as alert as a fighter pilot.
Back at the club, I found that the true joy of the place is simply wandering from drawing room to bar to brasserie to cigar lounge to heated terrace, sinking into armchairs at strategic points to sip cocktails, order nibbles, listen to guest speaker talks and gaze at all the artwork donated by members over the centuries.
Keep an eye out for a framed copy of Charles Dickens’ membership chit, as well as a piece by Stanley Spencer (presumably dropped off on a reluctant day trip from his beloved Cookham). There’s also a bronze by Alfred Gilbert, the man who designed the famous ‘Eros except it isn’t Eros’ statue in Piccadilly Circus. If you’re wondering, the statue is of Anteros – the god of requited love. The spirit of Eros, that of sex and passion, now MIA, was once found a little nearer to the back alleys of Soho.
Most beguiling of all, hung on a back staircase, is the reclining nude by a long-forgotten Victorian-era member named William Etty. The frame comes with a note underneath: ‘This painting originally represented Leda and the Swan but the voluptuous bird was transformed into innocent drapery by an artist who drew so poorly that the right leg, which he had to invent, does not fit onto the hip of the lady.’
The footnote does a neat job of summing up The Arts Club; a place in proud possession of a sense of humour, and a welcoming refuge where you can express yourself without fear of being chastised.
Annual membership at The Arts Club costs £3,200 a year, visit theartsclub.co.uk
