The Athenaeum Club

The Athenaeum has stood at the corner of Pall Mall and Waterloo Place since 1830, in a neoclassical clubhouse designed by Decimus Burton and now listed Grade I. A gilded statue of Athena by Edward Hodges Baily looks down from above the portico, and the frieze beneath the cornice copies the Panathenaic procession from the Parthenon marbles. The club was founded in 1824 for people distinguished in science, literature and the arts, marked its bicentenary in 2024, and keeps around two thousand members drawn from those fields and from medicine, law, the church and public service.

Inside, the rooms are arranged around the double staircase that rises from the front hall. The Coffee Room is the main dining room, with tall windows and globe chandeliers over round tables. The Morning Room serves as the bar: marbled ochre walls, green leather tub chairs and a dense hang of portraits. The first-floor Drawing Room, lined with bookcases and lit by table lamps, is the room the club dresses for a drinks reception, and the library runs to some 70,000 volumes across the South, West and North Libraries, where a smaller room is laid from time to time for a dinner beneath the shelves.

Hire is arranged through a member. The club takes non-club events at the sponsorship of someone on its books, the usual arrangement across the Pall Mall clubhouses, and catering is handled by the club's own kitchen. Capacities are not published. The house is a quiet one, and it keeps its habits: jacket and collar, no denim or trainers, phones confined to the telephone box in the front hall. Music and entertainment are settled with the club rather than assumed.