When Michelle Fisher got involved with running the Walthamstow Trades Hall, a social club in north-east London, something surprised her: how excited new recruits get about their membership pack. It’s nothing special – a faux-leather wallet containing a membership card and a fob for the door – but time and again, people kept asking: “Is my wallet ready yet?” Fisher laughs recounting this. “People just want to be part of something,” she says. “Especially when everything else is a bit difficult and stressful.” Tapping into this desire to belong, and to be invested in a community, has been central to Walthamstow Trades Hall’s recent regeneration.

Founded as a working men’s club back in 1919, the club sits in an unassuming building on a residential street. So many letters have fallen off the sign at the front entrance that it reads “T AM OW TR DES A L”. But anyone is welcome here – and this open ethos has helped the club find new life. When I visit on a rainy day in early summer, I find Fisher, a friendly 32-year-old with her hair scraped back with a scrunchie, sitting in the club’s cavernous main hall, typing away on her laptop as deliveries for the bar come in. She’s been the club’s secretary for two years, alongside a day job in tech (the club is not-for-profit, everyone on the committee is a volunteer). When she came on board, the Trades Hall’s membership was declining, in common with many former working men’s clubs around the country. “It wasn’t financially viable, so we thought: how do we re-engage our local community?” she says.

The club needed to attract new members if it was going to survive. They did this by emphasising inclusivity – bunting made of gay Pride flags hangs across the rafters of the main hall, a note of brightness against the traditional patterned carpet, dartboard and dark wooden bar. They’ve also gone out of their way to make people from the local South Asian community, many of whom don’t drink, feel welcome. During the energy crisis last year, the club won funding from the council to set up the space as a community living room, meaning that anyone could come in to sit in a warm room, have a tea and charge their phone. The club offers a broad range of events to get people through the door – regular karaoke nights, tea dances for pensioners, choir practices and toddler sessions, quizzes and comedy. The strategy has proved effective: membership went up 105% last year, and another 60% this year. Their oldest member is 93 and the youngest 19. To Fisher, it makes sense that people would want to sign up. “We’re all kind of floating about in cities and it’s hard to find a tangible, physical thing to attach ourselves to and feel proud of and be involved in,” she says. “Being able to give that to people is something really special.”

Private members’ clubs are an enduring feature of British social life – and they come in many forms. “Everyone knows what a pub is, but how they interpret a ‘club’ depends on their upbringing, class and geography,” says Sean Ferris, who publishes several club trade magazines and runs the annual Club Awards. Working men’s clubs were once the cornerstone of working-class life, while gentleman’s clubs have long been a fixture in high society. Across the spectrum, many clubs are adapting their offering. Former working men’s clubs, like the Walthamstow Trades Hall, are thinking about what they can offer their local communities. Sometimes, that simply means a place to go where you don’t have to spend much; after a decade and a half of austerity, councils have sold off thousands of public spaces, such as community centres and libraries. “For your £5-a-year membership, you have access to the building when it’s open, you’re not required to buy drinks,” says Maurice Champeau, general manager of Crookes Social Club in Sheffield. His club brings in revenue by hosting events for the general public, which allows them to keep membership costs low.

At the other end of the scale, a whole host of new elite clubs have shifted away from the model of fusty billiard rooms and dining halls to offer gyms, spas and co-working spaces to high-earning young professionals. New high-cost, self-described “exclusive” clubs seem to spring up every month – the AllBright, Twenty Two, the George – while others extend their reach. The ultimate example is the Soho House Group, which has rapidly expanded since its founding in 1995 and now has 42 clubs around the world, and more than 200,000 members, with many more on waiting lists to join. The Groucho Club, founded in 1985, recently announced plans to open a new branch in Yorkshire. While the financial picture is more complicated – in 2023 the Soho House Group reported losses of £92.5m – the basic fact remains that a lot of people, all around the country and from different strata of society, want to join private clubs. Why does this particular tradition endure? Is it, as Fisher believes, about the desire for community – or is there something else at play?

The sticky floors and open doors of the Walthamstow Trades Hall, where annual membership is £35, seem a far cry from the pricey poolside cocktails of Soho House, where membership is closer to £2,000 a year. But their history is intertwined. “The British are obsessed with socialising in a very regulated way, and clubs exist in all shapes and sizes,” says Seth Alexander Thévoz, author of Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members’ Clubs. “The idea of the working men’s club, which emerged in the 1850s, was a direct spin-off of Pall Mall clubs, an attempt to bring a slice of that community at affordable prices.”

Pall Mall is home to London’s “clubland”, a row of imposing Georgian buildings, which has housed old-school private members’ clubs since the 18th century. From the outset, many limited memberships topeople from a particular political group or profession; particular groups – the Garrick Club for actors, the Carlton for Conservatives, the Farmers Club for agricultural landowners. This was the Victorian era, when commentators frequently complained about social climbers and the nouveau riche, and elitism defined these clubs; they were essentially a way of institutionalising male power and privilege. Being nominated, elected and admitted into a club was a rite of passage for young aristocrats and a tangible confirmation of a hard-won status for those self-made men who made it into these hallowed hallways. (One example is Charles Dickens, who grew up in poverty, but became a member of the Athenaeum club.)

Many of these original clubs still exist today. Controversially, some still have rules associated with a bygone era. The Garrick, founded in 1831, hit the headlines in recent months after its men-only membership list, which includes senior judges and politicians, was revealed by the Guardian. Much of the outrage centred on the idea that women were being excluded from a space in which society’s power brokers could meet, network and have important conversations. In July, after a public outcry, the Garrick admitted its first-ever female members, the actors Dame Judi Dench and Sian Williams.

Private members’ clubs tend to flourish in times of political and social upheaval. The coffee houses of 17th-century London, out of which the Pall Mall clubs emerged, were places of debate after the English Civil War. The Groucho and Soho House emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as a challenge to the old-fashioned culture of traditional clubs, amid Thatcher’s economic reset and the rise of new technology. Now, as interest in private members’ clubs surges again, we are living in the long shadow of the 2008 financial crisis, a period of economic stagnation and dwindling national optimism.

“Weirdly enough, clubs are counter-cyclical, they tend to do really badly when there’s a boom in the economy overall, while usage goes right up in a recession,” says Thévoz. He points to a prosaic reason for this – if you’re a member, clubs can be surprisingly good value for a meal and a drink out.

But perhaps it is also true that in a period of economic anxiety or political flux, the desire to prove one’s social status or membership of a particular group or community feels even more pressing. Amy Milne-Smith, author of London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late-Victorian Britain, has argued that “the renaissance of clubland in recent decades speaks much to a new age of elitism”, with Oxbridge graduates dominating “political, economic, social and global networks of power”. Perhaps that stamp of approval sought by Victorian self-made men also appeals to 21st-century young professionals.

Today, “private members’ club” is a broad category – some might offer gyms or spas, others lectures and events – but all promise a familiar environment in which to socialise and, typically, subsidised costs for food or drink for members. The idea of belonging to a group remains central to their appeal.

Brian Clivaz is a restaurateur and club entrepreneur. He is a big name in the world of private clubs, and over his decades in the industry has founded Home House, been managing director of the Arts Club and CEO of the Devonshire. We meet one morning at his Soho restaurant L’Escargot, talking over a coffee as staff bustle around us getting ready for the lunchtime service. Clivaz is wearing a sharp suit and braces, and his bulldog, Doris, sleeps on the floor. “There has to be a community of people and those people – the regulars – make the club,” he tells me. “The major reason clubs fail is because they don’t get that community right. That’s the magic.” He explains his test: “If you went to the bar, could you strike up a conversation with the person next to you? Would you want to buy them a drink and, more importantly, would they be the sort of person who’d want to buy a drink for you?”

Most people agree that the feeling of safety, predictability and familiarity is a major draw. Eleanor, 37, an advertising executive, joined London’s Soho House branch over a decade ago, drawn in by an offer giving half-price membership to under-27s. “It was useful at a stage in my life when I was furiously dating a million people to take them somewhere familiar to me, where I felt safe because I knew the staff and they knew me,” she says. “Though if I’m honest, there was some status about it, too.”

This hits on something central to the appeal of high-end clubs: social aspiration and the prestige of being part of an elite group. “A club has to have a certain kudos, otherwise there’s no point being a member of it,” says Clivaz, matter-of-factly. “It’s about social standing.” The word “exclusive” features heavily in promotion; newspapers and magazines regularly round up lists of “London’s most exclusive clubs”. Of course, a key part of curating a group of like-minded people is excluding people who do not meet these criteria.

Clubs of all stripes face a constant tension between the need for exclusivity and the need to bring in members, and the financial revenue that comes with them. Soho House has come under criticism for expanding too much and losing the allure of exclusivity. The @sohohousememes account on Instagram has 135k followers, with posts decrying high prices and shoddy service. A recent caption reads: “At least my wine will be considered a vintage by the time it arrives.” Eleanor recently ended her membership for this reason. “It expanded so quickly. When I first joined, I knew a lot of people who were being rejected from the membership. They had strict criteria around being a successful person in the arts – and then that completely changed. They just let absolutely anyone in who wanted to pay to be there.”

From the Garrick Club to former working men’s clubs, members can be reluctant to change their entry rules, even if changing times necessitate it. “I never cease to be amazed that all committees have the same sort of arguments, from an East End working men’s club to a Pall Mall gentleman’s club,” says Thévoz. “It’s to do with sinking funds, long-term dilapidation, keeping subscriptions cheap and affordable, but also pulling up the drawbridge.”

Yet for all these similarities, elite clubs celebrate prestige and social status and are thriving, while working men’s clubs were set up to foster local communities and are facing catastrophic decline. “Working men’s clubs are slowly dying,and we have to either evolve or go extinct,” says Champeau. When he joined Crookes a few years ago it was in dire straits, with a bucket being passed around the members to raise money for the electricity bill. Champeau, a pub landlord by trade, opened the club up to the general public and started renting out function rooms. “We’ve had to be very flexible with what the space is used for,” he says. “It’s open arms – get people in and let them have a good time.” Now Crookes might host a drag night or a punk concert in one room, while old-time members play board games in the next. Some longstanding members quit in protest, but the club is thriving.

At the Walthamstow Trades Hall, eschewing elitism to open up to everyone has also proved an effective strategy. At first, displaying Pride flags alarmed some of the old-time members, but the club secretary approached this pragmatically, explaining that hosting a few LGBTQ+ events didn’t mean it was now a gay club, simply that everyone was welcome. Gradually, even the staunchest critics have come round, and some old traditions endure. Each month, a group of pensioners hold a tea dance in the main hall. They bring their own buffet and dance to the same tunes they’ve been dancing to for the last 20 years. “These are relationships that were built within these walls, which I think is a really special thing to see,” says Fisher.

In her view, the club provides something permanent in a tumultuous world. “Political climates are temporary, but clubs provide a constant,” she says. “For some people it might be a community centre or it might be their church or mosque, and for other people it’s coming to the club and playing pool. Those spaces should be protected at all costs. They are fundamental to what kind of society we want to end up being.”