Editorial
The private members' club has expanded considerably since Soho House normalised the format for a younger, creative-industry audience in the 1990s. What was once a small, opaque network of London institutions with decades-long waiting lists is now a global category with dozens of clubs competing for annual fees. Whether any of them are worth it depends almost entirely on what you are buying — and whether the bar is actually good.
The members' club pitch rests on three propositions: access control (no civilians), community (people like you), and facilities (a bar you can always get a table at). The first proposition has weakened significantly as clubs have scaled — a Soho House with 4,000 members in a single city is not the same proposition as the original Dean Street house with 300. The second proposition varies enormously by club. The third is the most consistently delivered, and for people who entertain regularly or live in cities where finding a table is genuinely difficult, it has real value.
The best members' clubs justify their annual cost by delivering something genuinely unavailable elsewhere: either access to a room you cannot enter as a non-member, or a consistent experience that public bars in the same city cannot reliably provide. The clubs that do not justify their fee are trading on the psychology of exclusivity — the bar is mediocre, the community is thin, and the only real product is the membership card itself.
Members' clubs justify their fees for three types of people: those who entertain clients or colleagues regularly and need a guaranteed table in a controlled environment; those who travel frequently between cities where the same club operates and value the consistency; and those whose professional network is concentrated inside a specific club's membership. For everyone else, the money is usually better spent on ten evenings at the best independent cocktail bars in your city.
The bar quality, specifically, is rarely the primary reason to join a members' club. The best standalone cocktail bars in any major city will outperform most club bars on programme depth and creativity. What clubs offer is atmosphere management and access reliability — valuable things, but different things.
Sofia covers European bar culture for barsforKings with a focus on the gap between reputation and reality. She has held memberships at five different clubs across three cities and has strong views about which represent genuine value.