Soho drinking clubs

From the Colony Room to Trisha’s, a look at Soho's clubs past and present. Yes, it's another nostalgic post.

With the news that the infamous Colony Room Club is back, though in a different venue, I thought I’d post an updated version of something I wrote a few years ago on Soho drinking clubs. There was also a story a couple of months ago that one of the few still going, Trisha’s aka the Hideout aka the New Evaristo club, was under threat so this is doubly timely. I’ll be recommending some wines on Sunday so it’s going to be a bumper weekend on Drinking Culture.

When someone says let’s go for a drink at my club, what do you imagine? A grand St James’s establishment like Boodle’s or White’s, or perhaps a media hangout such as the Groucho or Soho House? What you probably don’t think of is an unmarked door and a flight of rickety stairs. Yet through unpromising-looking doorways in and around Soho are little clubs where you can take a break from the 21st century. Places such as the Phoenix beneath the Phoenix theatre on Charing Cross Road, Gerry’s on Dean Street and the Academy on Lexington Street are relics of a time (Gerry’s has been going since 1955) when pubs had to close after lunch and not open again until the evening. People needed somewhere to drink in the afternoon and after 11pm last orders, and these clubs met the demand. 

Sebastian Horsley outside the Colony Room. Credit David Graham Scott.

They are subtly different from places like the Groucho where the successful and the ambitious congregate to sell things to each other. Nobody ever got any work done at Gerry’s. Chris Evans won’t be at the next table at the Phoenix. Not that you won’t run into celebrities, they’ll just be of the loucher sort. At the artist Sebastian Horsley’s 40th birthday at the Colony Room, I found myself drinking alongside Shane MacGowan and Bryan Ferry. A friend reminisced about hearing David Soul of Starsky and Hutch fame belting out his hit Silver Lady at Gerry’s late one night. The Academy, in contrast, is generally more sedate, you can order food and wine from Andrew Edmunds, the excellent restaurant below.

To gain entry to these establishments you are supposed to be a member but I would often get into Gerry’s late at night by claiming to be a friend of top crime writer Martina Cole. All the booksellers on Charing Cross Road seemed to have honorary membership of the Phoenix. At the New Evaristo Club (was there ever an old Evaristo Club and if so where was it?) on Frith Street aka Trisha’s aka Hideout there’s a sign saying ‘Membership Available’ but I never met anyone who was a member. 

These are ostensibly private clubs, but really they’re places for drinkers to circumvent Britain’s restrictive licensing laws. One of the first of these laws was the 1854 Sale of Liquors on Sunday Act, which meant that pubs were open from 1-2pm and then 6-9pm. You could only get a drink on a Sunday outside these hours if you were a traveller. The absurdity of this is immortalised in Diary of a Nobody when Charles Pooter is denied entry to a pub on Hampstead Heath because he’s from Holloway, but his friends are let in, claiming to be “bona-fide travellers” from far-off Blackheath.

Worse was to come during the first world war. The evening closing hour was changed from 12.30am to 11pm and pubs shut in the afternoon between 3pm and 6pm. This lasted without much change until 1988. It could have been worse: Sunday drinking was banned completely in Wales. At one point 60% of adult men in Wales belonged to special Sunday drinking clubs to get around this law. Drinking dens, legal and illegal, opened in all major British cities.

Laws were liberalised in the 1990s and pubs could theoretically stay open later. Yet it’s still not easy to get a late-night drink in England and Wales (things are much better in Scotland) unless you pay to go to a nightclub. For canny late-night drinkers there’s a network of so-called clubs, pool halls, backrooms of kebab shops, I’m thinking of the infamous Marathon on Chalk Farm Road, or good old-fashioned pub lock-ins. I’m sure readers will have their own suggestions.

A great club should have a dominant personality at the door or behind the bar. The Academy had Persian beauty Mandana Ruane and her team of small dogs. She has since moved out to the country. The Phoenix had Maurice Huggett who died in 2011. Dying before your time is something of a theme of Soho clubs: Bernie Katz the face of the Groucho died in 2017, Michael Wojas went out aged 53 shortly after Colony Room closed for good in 2008 and dear old Sebastian Horsley had a heroin overdose in 2010. Being a legend of Soho takes its toll. 

Other clubs missing in action include the Green Room near Charing Cross Station. It closed in 1999 and was turned into another media networking place which itself went under in 2014. In 2017 the Society Club in Soho was forced to shut its doors when the rent was tripled. With London property prices the way they are, it’s a miracle that any drinking clubs still exist. They are an anachronism but, despite all the talk of London being a 24 hour city, are often the only civilised places to get a drink after midnight. Treasure their dilapidated doorways for they are portals into another world, the Soho of Keith Waterhouse or Julian MacLaren-Ross. Some mornings I’d emerge onto the streets of Soho, find my way home and the next day think, did I dream that?