They say the best clubs need to have a raison d’etre: golf; fly fishing; Royal Automobiles. Here, food is the guiding principle. Well, food, wine and lots of Martinis.

Unlike other clubs, ‘Quo’ has a proper, public-facing restaurant, where chef proprietor Jeremy Lee chooses a beautiful menu that changes monthly, but always features a pie and an eel sandwich. As a result, the club upstairs has become a de facto rumpus room for the hospitality industry, and the odd sector-adjacent celeb. Keira Knightley is a regular, and it was no surprise when Ebon Moss-Bachrach from The Bear was recently spotted there enjoying a lunch of 50 oysters (and a Martini, natch).

Quo is small and limited in facilities. There’s no pool or gym here, and barely a fire escape to smoke on, but it maintains a gluttonous appeal and mix of creative chic all the same.

When Mark Birley transferred his club empire to Richard Caring for big bucks, there was a collective gasp – ‘how dare this arriviste take over the crown jewels of London’s club scene?!’ To Caring’s credit, he kept it as it was for many years, until a new megaplex club was proposed nearby. This glitzier incarnation does have one rare quality: it doesn’t cater for a specific clique or snobby niche – it entertains those that can afford it and for those that like to show off.

The garden is no longer the city’s finest dining room, but the super luxe interiors have set the standard for clubs worldwide. Although the crowd is not as hand-picked since the departure of its official gate-keeper, Astrid Harbord, you’ll still find the oil rich, the professional ladies and an occasional toff from the sticks, and that, in London, makes for a rare and reassuring continuity.

With its roots as a pigeon shooting club, the Hurlingham has always moved with the times: from pigeons to polo to anti-aircraft guns on the croquet lawns in the Blitz, the tennis club now has its own Giorgio Armani-sponsored tournament. The only thing more exclusive than club membership is membership of the club’s waiting list, which is now entirely closed.

Hurlingham’s rules-based system is something that’s lost at other clubs. For sportspeople, outfits must be ‘predominantly white’, there are no children or hats in the bar and picnics are forbidden, save for when watching cricket. I could go on. These rules are enforced with much pleasure by its staff and the wonkish mood continues with a feisty ‘Suggestions’ book, which could be printed in full as an avant-garde satire of High English snobberies.

If White’s is the club where members squander their parents’ wealth, then this is for parents who will leave plenty for their children to squander. Like a tech billionaire’s forest retreat, it’s the most exclusive and supremely discreet club, and all those within it are considered equal, apart from the loud American bankers.

The 300 members are all male, while the staff and managers are predominantly female, creating a distinctly civil and un-macho environment. The steam and changing room are among the best in the world where members are all handed their gym clothes on arrival, like schoolboys – you’d expect as much for £8,000 pa.

Rumours are the Birley Group finds the place to be more trouble than it’s worth. But if any club could find a buyer, it is the B&R’s members, who could afford to buy it many times over.

Nobody would accuse the Lansdowne of being cool. Less than 100 metres from Annabel’s, at the south end of Berkeley Square, it’s a world away from Richard Caring’s Euro Shangri-La. Instead, the Lansdowne is the members’ club that time forgot.

With a Robert Adam exterior and art deco interior, it is handsome but still a little careworn. The membership, too, is curiously out of time: not as ancient as some, but the kind of younger men and women who are drawn to organised fun, as well as fencing and squash matches against the RAC.

Many adore the club’s basement swimming pool, which wafts a chlorine perfume through Mayfair when the wind is right. There’s no proof it was the basis for Alan Hollinghurst’s steamy Corinthian Club in his novel The Swimming-Pool Library – but there’s no proof it wasn’t, either.

Was Soho Farmhouse ever cool? Perhaps in 2015, when Londoners wanted to drive two hours to sleep in a converted pigsty and queue for a picante with the people they saw in Shoreditch the night before. There must have been some reason Meghan Markle chose to have her hen do there. But if it was the place to be, it is not today. Instead, a visit to the 100- acre ersatz agricultural estate is a lesson in brand dilution.

‘Farmhouse’ has become staid, there are queues at peak times, service is slow and the use of laptops and swimming pools is governed by rules so obscure they make a Doge’s election look like a school raffle. Today, it must contend with a slew of ritzier Oxfordshire competitors such as the ever sprawling Bamford Empire’s Estelle Manor. You might say it is reaping what it sowed.

As you enter what its members consider to be the finest of the St James’s Clubs, a feeling of déjà vu can wash over you. By the time you sit for lunch, you realise what it is: basically the first-class lounge of the Titanic. A place where everyone considers themselves hugely important, but is so anachronistic and silly that most will actually sink to the bottom of the sea.

This is a club proudly stuck in the 80s (but founded in 1693 – the oldest club in London), and is no place for the minor public school, gin-and-Jag brigade. All of its members are spectacularly posh. Guests walk on eggshells in the fear that some grandee will look up from their paper, ask their surname and then judge them heavily. The club produces a small book annually with a full membership list, so members can judge other members from the comfort of their own estates.

For much of the past 20 years the Groucho has been content to trade on past glories, with a clientele comprised of the kind of gals and geezers who looked like they produced – or starred in – one Oasis video in 1997. They drank Martinis, they ate burgers, they thought about getting a room. It is ironic, then, that the club has changed course just as 90s nostalgia hits a new high point.

The aforementioned change has come in the form of new owners Artfarm, with a promise of rejuvenation and a second outpost in Bretton, Yorkshire. Although there have been predictable grumbles that the club has become ‘corporate’, it is too early to say whether the much-needed vibe shift will succeed. But it is undeniable that contemporary art is a classic unifier for young hot people and moneyed old people.

The Garrick was founded in 1831 for rakish actors, and the types of people who like to say they hang out with rakish actors. For many years, its USP was ‘Stephen Fry is a member here, and not just because the tie is ghastly’.

Recent events have certainly raised its profile. It began in 2020 when a ‘lingerie entrepreneur’ (the papers’ favoured term) instructed her lawyers to seek an injunction that would stop the club from “continuing to operate its discriminatory policy” of all-male members. A vote in May 2024 answered the historic question: can the girls come too? A majority of 562 members said, “OK then” (“and does anybody know any?”). The Garrick rumbled merrily on, with every single high-court judge ever still being a member, and Hugh Bonneville – just now with a couple of gals in the mix, too. Times change. Ties, blessedly, don’t.

For a long time, The Roof Gardens (then Kensington Roof Gardens) was best known for the flamingos living inside its walls, which your wackier aunt might remember from the 1980s when Branson ran the place. By the time of the nightclub’s closure in 2018, the birds were a metaphor for some less-than-desirable traits: gilded cages, fluttering privilege, and a noughties’ indifference to animal cruelty. (The flamingos were relocated to a farm in Norfolk.)

The new Roof Gardens are hoping for a clean break from this bad-jeans-and-brown-shoes past – and the resulting private members’ club, which opened in September, is quite remarkable. In some corners, it’s possible to believe you have been dropped into a Florentine stone walkway or are sitting in a friend’s palazzo in the Benahavís hills, rather than a few hundred feet above a busy highway in central London.