Talk:List of members' clubs in London

Flyfishers' Club

I am on the commitee of the the above and would like to help populate the Flyfishers' page. I am a wiki virgin and my attempts have all been deleted. Would anyone be able to help? (morganjonesuk@gmail.com) Morganix79 (talk) 13:50, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Are these London's gentlemen's clubs?

Alpine Club (UK) -- A former club of this type Cobden Club -- a working men's club Fox Club -- a members' bar and restaurant of modern foundation http://www.foxclublondon.com/site.html Portland Club -- a bridge club, probably without premises

I propose to cut these, unless anyone has other views. --Duncan 08:01, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

The Portland club meets at 69 Brook Street, the Savile Club. 157.203.42.175 (talk) 13:57, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Eccentric Club listing

There are several problems with this:

• Firstly, the listing keeps becoming hijacked for an advertisment of the club - which there isn't room for on this list. I created the format of this list so it would give us some basic, short, snappy information, and an Eccentric Club enthusiast keeps filling up their club's entry with a long advertisment for the club, 4-5 times the size of any other entry, so it fills up the screen. Please kindly stop restoring this, or this list will become unmanageable as people from every club will do the same. It will also make the list unencyclopaedic. I created an Eccentric Club article specifically so that we can post all the lovely details of the clubs' colourful history there, and not on the list.

• Secondly, there is no need to keep restoring the Eccentric Club in both the 'current clubs' and 'former clubs' lists. It belongs in one or the other. At the moment, the Eccentric Club does not meet the below agreed definition (which I incidentally had no say in) that London Clubs should have their own premises to qualify as 'clubs' for this article. This seems a very sensible definition, otherwise the list would go on forever, and include EVERY London society and nightclub containing the word 'club'. Judging from the information available, the Eccentric Club in its current form seems to be a 2008-founded group of 60 enthusiasts with a website, who organise meetings in different venues, and are striving to re-found the club. Personally, I applaud this bold venture. The minute they open their own set of regular premises, it would be more than sensible to add the new Eccentric Club to the list of 'current clubs'. But until then, I'm afraid it simply doesn't meet the necessary criteria for inclusion in the 'current' list. However, the Eccentric Club which legally wound up in 1986 still merits a place in the 'former clubs' list, and as such, I think it only fair to give the new group a one-line mention, and a link to its website. Eccentric enthusiasts, please don't keep spamming this with more information. Many thanks.

• Finally, can we nail down the myth that the current Eccentric Club has anything to do with the group set up in 1781? It is legally a separate entity from the 1890-1986 Eccentric Club, even though several members of the old club have re-joined. And I have a copy of Anthony Lejeune's book on this history of London clubs, which quite explicitly states that the 1890 club had nothing to do with earlier London clubs of that name, but was set up in tribute to them. If the club wishes to correct this on wikipedia, then please post a citation to a verifiable source in the relevant article (not this list), and we'll be more than happy to amend the list as well. Thank you. Debonairchap (talk) 18:42, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Dear Debonairchap, I appreciate the points you have raised above, and shall post nothing more until the club resolves the situation with its premises. I don't know whether I'm supposed to be posting anything here either. Any chance you may drop me a line to ecce@caenmort.com , so we could continue this conversation privately. Re: Lejeune is not the ultimate authority on the club, I have at least a dozen of other books of similar credibility. Unfortunately, in the 1970s when he was writing the book, the EC's Committee (that was his source) had very limited information about their own club's history. The new club has much more of it now, including the copies of handwritten documents of XVIII-XIX cc. "Legally", the 1890 club became incorporated only in 1912, but it does not mean it did not exist prior to that... Yours truly, Ecc. W. (talk)

• • We've discussed this by email, and I'm more than satisfied it was a genuine misunderstanding about the nature/guidelines of wikipedia! Future amendments, etc on the Eccentric Club article are more than welcome. Best wishes, Debonairchap (talk) 18:10, 05 January 2009 (UTC)

== Still around? ==the SESAME CLUB IS the SESAME CLUB still around?

I would like any information on whether the SESAME CLUB is still around, where, and when, if ever, membership became exclusively female. It was certainly around, with premises offering common room/s and some accommodation as recently as 1969, when a retired woman teacher visiting from New Zealand described it as a "Ladies Club" to which she was affiliated, and where she stayed briefly that year. As well as its educational and social purposes, like a number of such clubs, it appears to have been a radical/liberal women's response to the lack of amenities (not least toilet facilities) open to women when visiting Central London, equivalent to those offered by gentlemen's clubs. It was strongly felt that this lack inhibited the freedom of educated ladies to pursue cultural interests. "The Sesame Club... became a purely social club",but opened [apparently in 1895] "with the intention of forming a rallying point for all societies which were trying to help forward the reform of education, and it was hoped that it would become a recognized rendezvous for persons interested in education in all its branches, whether as professional teachers or as parents. Mr Montifiore and three other members of the Froebel Society were on the committee.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century the majority of upper class and middle class children in England received their first lessons in their own homes. Interesting parents in new methods of education and assisting them in bringing up their children were objects of the Sesame Club.

The Sesame Club provided a platform for various forms of progressive education, and amongst others for Miss Charlotte Mason, the founder of the Parent's National Education Union and author of the book Home Education.... By 1899 the Sesame Club had nine hundred members, but there were associated with it people who were interested in its educational aims but did not want to belong to a social club: they formed the Sesame League...." http://www.friedrichfroebel.com/sesame.html source: pages 77 - 79 of Friedrich Froebel and English Education edited by Evelyn Lawrence 1952 site map - info@friedrichfroebel.com Copyright © 2002 friedrichfroebel.com. All rights reserved. PS Also interested on anyone researching these "Ladies Clubs" now. Also "Edith Sitwell. Autograph letter signed from Sitwell to Humphrey Searle, dated February 24, 1949 with envelope. Reference to an upcoming performance of Searle's composition..... and to lunch at the Sesame Club to discuss the work." Sitwell-Searle Collection. http://www.library.georgetown.edu/dept/speccoll/wwcoll.htm Thank you in advance. Gabadab

THE BEEFSTEAK CLUB

Is the Beefsteak Club part of the Celdonian now? --Duncan 08:01, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Link to Fox club is wrong

I'm not quite sure how to correct this but the link to the Fox club listed here goes to one at Harvard, not the one in London. In order to fix I think someone would need to make a new page like Fox club (London) or Fox club (gentleman's club). I would but I know very little about it other than that their food is good! --PaulWicks 10:12, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

How old is the Fox Club? Deipnosophista (talk) 19:24, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Criteria

I have removed this from the main article. While I agree with it, it seems to be a policy for includion on this page, which shuld wither be here or in the article on clubs. --Duncan 19:46, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

The boundaries of this type of club are not entirely clear cut (it is certainly no longer the case that women are excluded from all these clubs), but at a minimum clubs should only be included if they have a clubhouse and exist primarily to provide services to their members, rather than to profit from hiring out facilities commercially.

I think it would be useful to reinstate it, simply as a brief definition of what is meant by the term. It is common for daughter articles to summarise parent articles in their introductions, and I think it helpful for readers (the vast majority of whom, I would imagine, never look at talk pages). BrainyBabe 21:15, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

I concur, It's not just common but mandatory as per WP:LIST (esp. sections "Lead section" and "Criteria for inclusion in lists"). — Komusou ^talk @ 08:27, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

WP:FOOD Tagging

This article talk page was automatically added with {{WikiProject Food and drink}} banner as it falls under Category:Restaurants or one of its subcategories. If you find this addition an error, Kindly undo the changes and update the inappropriate categories if needed. You can find the related request for tagging here -- TinucherianBot (talk) 10:13, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Featured

I'm thinking of bringing this up to Featured status. Any suggestions on table format? Mine would be Name - Date established - founder(s) - any membership restrictions - website. Ironholds (talk) 16:01, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

I would heartily concur, with a few suggestions:

-as you can tell from my most recent edit, I think something about how long the club has been located at its present premises would be good - a lot of clubs claim 'foundation dates' from the nineteenth or even eighteenth century, and are actually very modern buildings.

-instead of 'membership restrictions', how about listing 'affiliation'? I think you'll find that 95% of them were once men-only, and 90% of them are now mixed-sex, so listing membership restrictions seems a bit pointless. Whereas the whole *point* of a club is that people with shared trades, professions, interests, politics, experience, etc, meet up in one place, so it's definitely worth putting this down in the table - I'm not sure the present format tells us much about this at a glance, other than through the club name.

-While I would stop short of giving their exact addresses (although anyone can look this up in the phone book, or Who's Who, and it's already listed in their articles), why not list which street they're on? Again, 90% of them are on well-known, major streets in central London. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.45.130.213 (talk) 01:14, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Works for me! Thanks for the suggestions. I'm currently working on another couple of lists, but once finished I'll move on to this. Ironholds (talk) 11:36, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Format changes and pictures

Hello, I put the clubs into a relevant table format, which I hope tidies up the page a bit.

As part of this, I had to delete 2 of the 5 pictures at the top of the page, since they could no longer fit alongside the list, and instead you had to scroll down a list of photos to get to the top of the article. The two pictures I deleted were of the Army and Navy Club, and the Oriental Club - this was because:

-The illustration of the Army and Navy Club is of a long-demolished building, which doesn't resemble the current building;

-The picture of the Oriental Club is of a building they've only occupied since the 1960s;

and so if we're going for one or two examples of 'typical' club architecture, these may not be the best pictures on Wikipedia. Anyhow, they're all very similar, so I thought the remaining 3 (the Athenaeum, the Garrick and the Reform) would do very well indeed.

Anyhow, these pictures both show up in the club's articles, so I hope I haven't treaded on anyone's toes by deleting them for space reasons! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.45.130.213 (talk) 18:29, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject London Clubs

Might this be worth doing? Time permitting, I'm very happy to considerably expand the information we have on these - but I see that when intial 'stub' articles are set up on individual clubs, they (quite understandably) have their notability questioned, and in some cases are speedily deleted. Which is quite frustrating for those of us genuinely interested in these places as slices of London history!

I'd like to suggest the creation of a 'WikiProject London Clubs', aimed at documenting these from the angle of their contribution to the social history of London. I'm also keen to start documenting the histories of a lot of these 'defunct clubs', since a lot of them are fascinating.

With the posting of a lot of contemporary sources like http://www.victorianlondon.org , there's now a whole lot of verifiable material online we can cite.

I'd suggest the following possible directions we could take on this:

• Setting up at the very least a stub article for each club named in the list, with facts to be added to it over time.

• Now that we have addresses for so many of these, and since they're all so close to one another, as a Londoner I'm quite willing to spend a day walking past all of these and taking a comprehensive collection of photos of the exteriors of the surviving buildings, or in the case of defunct clubs, the buildings that used to house these - since a lot of these are purpose-built clubhouses of great architectural interest, i.e. the old United Services Club building, which still has all its fixtures and fittings intact, and now hosts the IoD.

• I have at home a complete run of Who Was Who from 1897 onwards - this gives people's last Who's Who entry at the time of their death, and includes all their club memberships when they died. When I have the time, I'd like to start hacking away at this to upload lists to the individual articles, of notable members.

• As an extension of the above suggestion, we may get to a stage when the members' lists are sufficiently long for us to start putting a category at the bottom of biographical articles, i.e. 'Category: Members of the Carlton Club' at the foot of Stanley Baldwin's article, etc.

• We should also agree a binding set of criteria for what is and isn't a club - the above definition seems absolutely fine, and indeed I've already tried to work around it in including and excluding items on the list. But the biggest menace, which has contributed to the deletion of several articles which needn't have been deleted, has been the over-eager posting of advertisments for surviving club's current facilities, so I think if we can cut down on such references, we can get on with documenting their history!

What do people think? Any suggestions? Although I'm working on it, I'm afraid my technical grasp of formatting on wikipedia etc does leave something to be desired, so any help with this side of it, or initiating the project, would be most appreciated. - Debonairchap(talk) 20:01, 01 January 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Debonairchap (talk • contribs)

I really like this idea and would be interested in contributing. However, perhaps WikiProject London Members Clubs might be a better title, to differentiate from nightclub venues, strip clubs and so forth? SupernautRemix (talk) 11:58, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Most of the clubs listed here are, in fact, co-ed

I hope I won't be accused of sophistry for pointing out that the majority of clubs listed here are, in fact, open to male and female members, which begs the question why the entry is called "...gentlemen's clubs". Indeed, at least one of them is only open to women! Would it make more sense to rename the entry "List of London's private clubs", or to spin off separate lists for gentlemen's, ladies' and co-ed clubs? Bricology (talk) 04:45, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a directory

This is a list. Please only include entries in this list that have own articles. Wikipedia is not a directory! Mootros (talk) 03:11, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

See AFD discussion, to which you weren't part, as well as Talk:List of traditional gentlemen's clubs in the United States. Please kindly stop your unilateral edit war, or this will be reported to an administrator.Clubwiki (talk) 15:24, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Information is out of date.

Most of the membership fees have not been updated for some considerable time. I was able to place the correct information for the Marylebone Cricket Club, but do not have the time to research the remaining fees. In view of the fact that any update is almost bound to be out of date again with a month or two, would it not be better to eliminate them altogether? 86.150.139.85 (talk) 17:55, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Absolutely it would be better to remove the directory-type information of current users' fees, as it will become outdated and it is not encyclopedic. See wp:NOTDIRECTORY. --doncram 17:24, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

And, removed by me in two edits. Besides removing the directory-like, unsupported membership fee info, i also removed the column of "royalty affiliation" information, which seemed horrible to me. Horrible because it is at once directory-like and unsupported and seems to be blatant marketing rubbish asserting association/endorsement of specific royalty members. As if, if only u spend $x you can join too, and rub elbows with royal person Y. I am sure the royalty mentioned do not want to be endorsing the clubs, especially via a Wikipedia list-article where they are not even being paid or raising money for a charity or whatever by their endorsement. :( --doncram 17:37, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Walbrook Club

User:Prp132, a new user who has yet to contribute anything unrelated to this club, keeps adding it to this list. As s/he seems unaware of the WP:BRD principle I thought I'd raise it myself. Opera hat (talk) 20:22, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

PRP132: Because I think it is grossly unfair to classify The Walbrook Club as a 'business' club based purely on its age when it is a club in the truest sense, just as much as any on the list. If you knew The Walbrook you would know that papers/business matters are not to be used/discussed in public spaces. Its raison d'être is to be a social venue for its members and guests. I invite you to have a tour and see for yourself. It should be on that list, the list is incomplete without it. I somehow doubt that you know it better than I do. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Prp132 (talk • contribs) 21:50, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

And that's precisely why your editing looks bad. As a member, of course you want your club to be listed along with the likes of White's and Boodle's. See WP:CONFLICT. Opera hat (talk) 12:24, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm not a member.. Looks bad? This is meant to be factual, looks play no part whatsoever. The fact is The Walbrook must be on that list seeing as it is a London club like all the others. The only difference is its age. I cannot think of a single argument against its inclusion. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.202.128.66 (talk) 12:35, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

• The IP address above 89.202.128.66 (talk · contribs · WHOIS) is registered to Edelman, a PR firm, and has extensively edited the Walbrook Club article in the past. DuncanHill (talk) 23:14, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

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