From the November 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

Dinner at the Garrick, and salmon and cucumber is a combination to be found slipping down the shirtfronts of many of the club’s members. The pink-and-green striped Garrick tie – which enjoyed some prominence last year during the Guardian’s campaign for admission of women members – is only respectable, dedicated wearers feel, when embellished with splashes of gravy. Diners looking to colour-coordinate their neck attire with what’s on their plates are spoiled for choice: to start they could go for Devonshire crab cocktail with dashi jelly, apple and samphire; or potted shrimps with marinated cucumber; or that ketchup-laced retro classic, prawn cocktail with Marie Rose sauce, here served with avocado and lime. Next comes ample opportunity for gravy-spattering: Yorkshire grouse with game chips and bread sauce; grilled Devonshire lamb cutlets; calf’s liver, fillet steak – the list goes on. 

As at many of the older London gentlemen’s clubs, the main dining room at the Garrick is known as the coffee room – a hangover from the city’s 17th-century coffee houses, the ancestors of the private members’ club. And if there is still a sense, as a female diner, of having breached the defences to be sitting in this Italianate palazzo in the West End, the greater pleasure is in taking in the spectacle of what hangs on the walls. Founded in 1831 in honour of the actor-manager David Garrick (1717–79), the club has accumulated the world’s largest collection of art relating to the history of British theatre. Pride of place at one end of the coffee room are two large pendant paintings commissioned by Garrick in 1762 from Johan Zoffany: they show the celebrated actor, his wife and companions enjoying the grounds of his Thames-side retreat at Hampton, which featured a temple to Shakespeare designed for Garrick by Robert Adam. The club bought the paintings at Sotheby’s in 2011 for £6m, a splurge made possible by its ‘Pooh money’ – £32m from the sale of the rights to the works of A.A. Milne, a former member, to Disney.

A good chunk of the Garrick’s collection – which includes many theatrical portraits by Zoffany and Samuel De Wilde, who had his studio nearby at Covent Garden – was inherited from the actor Charles Mathews (1776–1835), who would buy pictures of great actors in character (Garrick included) for inspiration when he was preparing for the same role. Thespian club members continue to benefit: one of a brace of actors in the downstairs bar when I was there recently looked strikingly like a nearby portrait of the actor-manager Sir Squire Bancroft by Hugh Goldwin Riviere.

Casting an eye over the decorations while putting on the nosebag, as that inveterate club man Bertie Wooster might have put it, comes highly recommended in The London Club: Architecture, Interiors, Art, a new book with texts by Andrew Jones and photographs by Laura Hodgson. For some of the 46 establishments it surveys, food and art are existentially linked. Dinners, Jones writes, were the ‘initial raison d’être’ of the Sketch Club, set up in 1898. ‘Its founders broke away from the Langham Sketching Club over heated arguments as to whether a hot dinner was a more appropriate post-sketch repast than bread and cheese.’ One version of the Beefsteak Club’s origin story, meanwhile, goes back to the 1730s, when the landscape artist and scene painter George Lambert would grill steaks in his studio at the Covent Garden Theatre. By the 1750s the ‘Sublime Society of Beefsteaks’ had become a weekly steak-eaters’ club whose members included William Hogarth (lending another layer, perhaps, to his 1748 painting O the Roast Beef of Old England). A Georgian gridiron hanging on a wall inside the club today is said to be Lambert’s and has given the club its motif, outlined on china (with the motto ‘Beef and Liberty’), furniture and even the rooms’ Arts and Crafts lanterns. Keep your eyes peeled and you’ll see it carved into the club’s unassuming facade near the National Portrait Gallery.

If the Beefsteak is held by many to serve the best food of all London clubs, it was the Reform that comfortably boasted that accolade in the 19th century. The architect Charles Barry designed the club’s vast kitchens in collaboration with its famed French chef, Alexis Soyer. They incorporated the first town gas-fired stoves in Britain, cooling and heating boxes, steam-powered dumbwaiters and custom-made furniture such as a 12-sided prep table. With such a talent in such a kitchen, cooking as art form was inevitable. As Jones notes, ‘The 2.5 foot meringue pyramid he designed for a banquet to welcome Egypt’s Ibrahim Pasha in 1846, and its accompanying Gâteau Britannique à l’Amiral, a cake in the form of a giant man-of-war carrying English and Egyptian flags and filled with a cargo of frozen peach mousse, must surely count as some of the great structures in the history of London club architecture.’ While Soyer catered to old-school English tastes – his boiled beans and bacon were beloved of Thackeray – his signature Côtelettes à la Reform, still served at the club, defy categorisation. These breaded cutlets are served with a sauce that includes tongue, truffle and gherkins, garnished with strips of boiled egg white.

Such dishes, of course, can have a soporific effect. In the Library at Brooks’s, pillows are balanced on the back of a Chesterfield for those in need of a post-prandial snooze, overlooked by portraits of Dilettanti by George Knapton (pun intended?). Other club furniture, however, testifies to the less desirable consequences of overindulgence: weighing chairs and gout stools contribute to the sense of some of these places as ‘interactive’ museums of Georgian and Victorian London – Thomas Rowlandson prints in three dimensions. Perhaps there’s something to be said for a packet of Tayto crisps at the Mildmay Club.

The London Club: Architecture, Interiors, Art, by Andrew Jones and Laura Hodgson, is published by ACC ART Books.

From the November 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.