Royal Automobile Club

The Royal Automobile Club's Pall Mall clubhouse opened on 23 March 1911, designed by Mewès and Davis (the practice behind the Ritz) in a late French Renaissance manner, with a Beaux-Arts frontage to Pall Mall and a quieter elevation to Carlton Gardens. Behind it sits a working clubhouse of 108 bedrooms, a swimming pool, Turkish baths and a motoring library, plus the rooms that give the building its character: the glass-roofed Great Gallery, the Art Deco Brooklands Room, the Long Bar and the Club Room.

Seven banqueting rooms take private events. The Mountbatten Room is the headline space and the largest private room on Pall Mall: 3,150 square feet under nine chandeliers, with mirrored panels, marble fireplaces and windows onto Pall Mall itself. It holds 450 for a reception, 210 on dinner rounds and 160 for a dinner dance, which puts it among the very few club rooms in St James's that can carry a full-scale party rather than a dinner. The Committee Room seats 70 and receives 160, and is routinely paired with the adjoining Mall Room for drinks afterwards. On the second floor, the Terrace Room opens through French doors onto a private terrace above Carlton Gardens, with St James's Park beyond; it is the room the Club is asked for all summer.

Access runs the way it has always run at a Pall Mall club: every event, function or meeting must be sponsored by a member. That is a route in rather than a closed door, and it is what keeps the building as it is. The Club's own wedding programme accommodates musicians and DJs and sets a dance floor in the Mountbatten Room, so music is provided for. Licence hours and in-house AV are a conversation for the banqueting team.