Why did the Liberals build a private members club in London?

The world was a different place when the Liberals first started considering building a private members club in London in 1882. Edison was about to open the world’s first commercial power station at Holborn Viaduct. The Royal Courts of Justice were nearing completion, and Charles Darwin had recently died, having spent much of his life challenging some of the established assumptions of Victorian Britain. Just 12 years earlier, the Victoria Embankment had been completed. It formed part of an extraordinary programme of engineering works around the Thames which helped tame the river, provide London with a much-needed sewerage system and create new land on which the rapidly expanding capital could continue to develop.

It was on this newly reclaimed land that the Liberal Party saw an opportunity to build something unusual: a private members club in London that would be different from the established clubs of Victorian Clubland.

The idea was not simply to provide Liberals with somewhere to eat, drink and socialise. The proposed club was intended to be a political and social home for a rapidly expanding Liberal movement.

The first meeting of the new club was held on 16 November 1882 at the Westminster Palace Hotel on Victoria Street. The hotel, which has long since been demolished, provided a temporary home while the Liberals looked for a permanent site.

The Club’s eventual home would be something much more ambitious.

A different kind of London private members club

Victorian London already had an established tradition of private members clubs, many closely associated with particular social classes, professions or political interests.

The Liberal Party was intent on something very different. Founder of the Club, Prime Minister William Gladstone, said on the laying of the foundation stone:

“Speaking generally, I should say there could not be a less interesting occasion than the laying of the foundation-stone of a Club in London. For, after all, what are the Clubs of London? I am afraid little else than temples of luxury and ease. This, however, is a club of a very different character.”

It was the aim of the Club to provide a place where political discussion, campaigning, dining and social life could exist alongside one another.

The question was how it should be built to represent Liberalism while incorporating the concepts that the Club should form. The Liberals wanted a building grand enough to represent an increasingly confident political movement, but also one that looked towards the future. Rather than simply copying the traditional Gothic clubs of London’s political Clubland, they turned to Alfred Waterhouse, designer of the Natural History Museum and one of the most prominent architects of Victorian Britain.

Waterhouse was also well connected to the Liberal establishment, as his brother Theodore Waterhouse was solicitor to the Club. The resulting building was constructed between 1884 and 1887 and combined Renaissance, Gothic and Flemish influences. It was an appropriate mixture for an institution trying to bridge the old and the new.

Leeds pottery in a London private members’ club

Perhaps the most unusual feature of Waterhouse’s design is the extensive use of glazed and highly patterned terracotta. The tiles throughout the Club serve several purposes: they are highly practical for a space with high volumes of traffic and activity, allowing quick and easy cleaning, something which was particularly important in the sooty atmosphere of Victorian London. The tiles were produced by the Leeds Burmantofts Pottery. Waterhouse had already used Burmantofts tiles in the Yorkshire College in Leeds, while it made sense to use them once again at the Club. Their use also represented something much deeper and more important to the Liberal psyche. The location of production and choice of manufacturer was intended as a homage to the industrialists, entrepreneurs and professional classes who made up much of the Club’s membership. They reflected the world the Liberal movement represented: industrial Britain, manufacturing, commerce, professional achievement and technological progress.