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<\/p>\nBack when they were in their Regency period infancy, the popularity of gentlemen\u2019s clubs among London\u2019s aristocracy stemmed from the places being simulacrums of home. The fireplace would crackle heartily, the roast beef would be plentiful, and the cognac would always be of an appropriate vintage.<\/p>\n
Except none of the above elements ever really bore close scrutiny to the home life of even the most sybaritic members of the nobility. Back in the homestead in those days, you had to check if the kitchen staff had any decent meat in the pantry and, if the serving staff had gone to bed, you may have had to stoke the fireplace and pour the cognac yourself.<\/p>\n
The blue door on Charles Street that leads into Mark\u2019s Club is intended to look domestic. Though whose home this space could ever have belonged to is open to question. The immense George Stubbs equine portrait in the tiny lobby, the Morris & Co wallpaper, the gentle diurnal tick of the mantelpiece clock, the deep carpets and steep, creaking stairs make for a home that is gravid with the stylistic motifs of the period just before a generation of men were sent to the French and Belgian trenches.<\/p>\n
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Yet, if Mark\u2019s Club were a home, it would be too grandiose for PG Wodehouse, too tidy for Robert Falcon Scott, too secular for GK Chesterton and too patriarchal for Emmeline Pankhurst. Mark\u2019s Club likes to think of itself as a \u2018home away from home\u2019, whatever that means. But it\u2019s nothing of the sort \u2013 in the best possible way. It\u2019s a fantasy home. It\u2019s not a home that resembles anything anyone has ever lived in.<\/p>\n
Its history is a comparatively short one. The late Mark Birley, who founded nearby Annabel\u2019s club in the 1960s, decided he wanted to open a different kind of club; one more attuned to the storied gentlemen\u2019s clubs of St. James\u2019s, \u00e0 la White\u2019s and Boodles, but perhaps without the weight of history that had, by the turn of the \u201970s, turned these places into flock-wallpapered convalescent homes for the last of the Victorians.<\/p>\n
Mark\u2019s Club opened in 1972 and Birley himself later remarked that the Charles Street townhouse possessed \u2018more of my personality than any of my other places\u2019. Birley\u2019s father, Oswald, was a distinguished portrait artist, yet there are none of Birley Senior\u2019s pieces on the walls today. Instead, the art is of the auricular persuasion of either somewhat fey-looking young men (Th\u00e9odore Rousel\u2019s 1670 Portrait of a Young Gentleman or, predominantly, oil paintings of stags, horses and dogs). It\u2019s all very reassuring, very roast lamb with all the trimmings, and redolent of the type of city gent who knows how to wear a tailored suit yet has a country wardrobe brimming with Barbour.<\/p>\n
Things have changed a little since 1972. The waiters will still set ablaze your cr\u00eape Suzette tableside and the Mark\u2019s Club martini is still one of the most potent in town. But the townhouse, which has a capacity of barely 100 on its busiest nights, was given a makeover last year, stripping back some of the more en trop modernisations to make the club look as it did upon opening.<\/p>\n
Richard Caring, who bought Mark\u2019s Club from Birley shortly before his death in 2007, has talked of retaining the club\u2019s \u2018quintessential British identity\u2019. It succeeds. This place is as British as John Bull joining Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet for a dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Of course, no one in that triptych are real people. And that\u2019s what Mark\u2019s Club really excels at: providing a sense of Albian identity that we know is folkloric but, even to us natives, doesn\u2019t feel ersatz or insincere.<\/p>\n
The 1950-era copies of Country Life on the sideboard, the acres of mahogany, the clarets, the English cheeses, the Dover sole, the white tablecloths; it should feel atavistic and heavy. But, somehow, all this velvet and polished wood adipose conspires to create a feeling of terpsichorean elan; as if, deep down, we Brits know that the starch, mutton chops and pie-crust of this rainy island are no match for laughter, filled glasses, and having somewhere to hang our sopping umbrella.<\/p>\n
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I\u2019d read that the club\u2019s re-togged interior is based on the rooms in Richard Caring\u2019s own London home. I suspect, however, that should I surprise Caring in his kitchen for breakfast one morning, there would be a half-eaten bowl of muesli on the table and a mote of crumbs around the bottom of the toaster.<\/p>\n
This is what happens in homes and, indeed, any actual \u2018home away from home\u2019. Mark\u2019s Club is neither of these things. And it\u2019s all the better for it.<\/p>\n
Membership \u00a31,250 + \u00a3500 joining fee for under-35s; \u00a32,750 + \u00a31,250 joining fee for over-35s. Visit marksclub.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n