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The story of The Travellers Club, the oldest club on Pall Mall and a home-from-home for globetrotters for 200 years

To mark the bicentenary of The Travellers Club – the oldest club in Pall Mall – John Martin Robinson tells the story of an institution and its home, a purpose-built Renaissance palace. Photographs by Paul Highnam.

The Travellers Club was founded in May 1819, brainchild of Viscount Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary and British Minister Plenipotentiary at the Congress of Vienna. He spoke of establishing a club in which men could meet socially with other travellers, visiting ‘foreigners of distinction’ and diplomats.

Throughout its history, these elements have been a strong part of the club’s character. To qualify, members had to travel 500 miles in a straight line outside England. A member quipped it had to be on land, otherwise ‘convicts from Botany Bay might have qualified’.

Photograph by Paul Highnam/Country Life Picture Library

The club emerged after the Napoleonic Wars, when war and trade had carried mariners, soldiers and officials across the world. For cultural travellers, conflict had deflected visits from the usual Grand Tour destinations to Greece, the Levant and Egypt.

Early members included five future Prime Ministers – Aberdeen, Palmerston, Canning, Lord John Russell and the Earl of Derby – as well as several Greek Revival architects/designers: Smirke, Wilkins, Westmacott, Thomas Hope and C. R. Cockerell, the latter the club’s architectural conscience.

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There were diplomats, such as the Earl of Elgin, who gave a plaster cast of the Parthenon Marbles, and his associates Lt-Col William Leake, who brought the Marbles to London, and William Richard Hamilton, Elgin’s secretary, who prevented the French from removing the Rosetta Stone from Egypt.

They were all trustees of the British Museum and several founders of the National Gallery joined them, including Sir George Beaumont, George Vernon and the Rev Holwell Carr, who all gave their collections to the gallery.

The founder chairman was the 2nd Lord Auckland, later Governor General of India and responsible for the unsuccessful First Afghan War. Other committee members included John Sawrey Morritt, friend of Walter Scott, who had surveyed the scene of the Iliad and bought Velásquez’s ‘Rokeby Venus’, and Sir Gore Ouseley, the earliest British ambassador to Persia. Military figures in the early membership included the Duke of Wellington, the Marquess of Anglesey and Lords Raglan and Cardigan.

‘This house, in turn, proved inadequate as the membership grew’

The first foreign visitors were Russian: Count Simon Woronzow, ambassador to George III, and his son, Prince Michael Woronzow, commander of the Russian cavalry at Moscow in 1812 and governor of the Caucasus, who employed Edmund Blore to design a Moorish-Jacobethan palace at Alupka in the Crimea.

Most famous of the early diplomat members was Talleyrand during his four years as ambassador in London, playing whist most nights and for whom an extra handrail was added to the stair bannisters.

The early visitors also included writers, such as the American Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Frenchman Louis de Vignet. A less welcome guest, who caused trouble by taking books from the library and criticising the card accountant, was Prince Pückler-Muskau. He left a description of the club in his Tour of a German Prince in England (1832).

He was complimentary about the club as an institution, but less so about the members: ‘The English nobility haughty as it is, can scarcely measure itself against the French in antiquity and purity of blood.’ He described them as ‘new families, often of very mean and even discreditable extraction’ and commented that it was easy to muddle the servants for the masters, as the former had more ‘natural dignity’ and better manners.

In 1819, the club took temporary premises in Waterloo Place, which were adapted by Cockerell. These proved too small and rickety and it soon moved to a larger house at 49, Pall Mall. This was also converted for the club by Cockerell, who presented his plastercast of the Phigaleian Marbles from the Temple of Apollo Epikourios, which he had excavated at Bassae and secured for the British Museum. This was installed in the Coffee Room (now transferred to the library of the Barry building) and Lord Elgin’s plaster Parthenon Marbles in the Drawing Room. They gave the building a strongly Grecian character during its 10-year existence.

This house, in turn, proved inadequate as the membership grew. A perfect new site presented itself on the other side of Pall Mall when George IV moved to Buckingham Palace and Carlton House was redeveloped.

The Office of Woods and Forest (Crown Estate) were keen to spread the architectural grandeur of the Metropolitan Improvements along Pall Mall by encouraging new club buildings, which were more impressive than private houses. On either side of Waterloo Place were the United Service Club, designed by Nash, the Athenaeum by Decimus Burton and, opposite the former, the United University Club by William Wilkins.

In 1828, The Travellers secured the site of three houses immediately adjoining the Athenaeum for its permanent base. This was not without hitches, as George IV, with characteristic insouciance, kyboshed the original site deal by insisting on retaining a house on it for a member of his Household; the club accepted a slightly more constricted site, with a condition that the land behind was not built on, and so the setting of trees and grass in Carlton Gardens survives.

Under the chairmanship of Lord Granville Somerset, The Travellers chose its architect by competition. No other St James’s club has selected an architect by such a process.

In May 1828, it was resolved to ‘procure plans from no less than five eminent architects’ and to obtain cost estimates from an ‘experienced surveyor’. For the latter, they chose Joseph Henry Good, Surveyor to the Com-missioners for Building New Churches.

In fact, seven architects were approached initially and 11 in total. Many had already designed clubs. Two members of The Travellers were included: Robert Smirke and William Wilkins. John Peter Deering (a classical archaeologist and, with Wilkins, joint architect of the United University Club), William Atkinson (a pupil of James Wyatt), Decimus Burton, Benjamin Dean Wyatt (architect of Crockford’s and the Oriental, son of James) and Lewis Wyatt (James’s nephew).

The following week, four more architects were approached: Henry Harrison, Jeffry Wyatville, Charles Barry and Thomas Hopper (architect of Arthur’s Club). A couple more were subsequently asked: Ambrose Poynter and Edward Blore. Of these, Smirke, Burton, Lewis Wyatt and Jeffry Wyatville declined, but eight submitted designs.

As the drawings of unsuccessful entries were returned with thanks, all are now lost.

Cockerell was not on the sub-committee, but was on the general committee, and his fastidious criticism elsewhere of his colleagues’ work may explain why some were turned down; nearly everybody thought Blore uninspired and Poynter lacked distinction.

The palm was offered to the outsider, Charles Barry. At 33, he was the youngest to enter and had designed little except the Greek Revival Royal Institution of Fine Arts (now Art Gallery) in Manchester and some cheap Commissioners’ churches in Man-chester and London. The former may have been familiar to northern members, such as Edward Legh of Lyme or Edward Bootle-Wilbraham, but he cannot otherwise have been known to the committee.

His adventurous travels as a student to France, Italy, Greece and Turkey would have appealed to the club, but it was probably his track record with the Commissioners of New Churches that won him the job. Joseph Good was able to advise the club that Barry was experienced in keeping within approved building budgets and that advice may have been decisive. There was also the originality and excellence of the design, with its clever planning for the deep site and the novel deployment of Italian Renaissance palazzo architecture.

The competition design of 1828 was revised to meet the present, narrower site in March 1829 and then revised again to meet criticisms from the Crown and Athenaeum about the likely impact on the cornice of the latter.

Barry’s ingenious solution was to create recesses on both elevations adjoining the Athenaeum. This allowed slightly more interesting shapes for the main rooms and enabled the cornice of The Travellers to be returned at the sides rather than cut off, something that has always been admired.

Externally, Barry drew on Florentine and Venetian sources for the two elevations, Raphael’s Palazzo Pandolfini for Pall Mall and the Grand Canal for Carlton Gardens (where the lawns substituted for Venetian water).

Inside, the vocabulary stretched to include Grecian and English Palladian details, in the library chimneypieces or the carved-oak Grand Staircase. Enthusiasm for the latter may have come from the chairman of the building committee Gen the Hon Sir Edward Cust, with memories of his ancestral home at Belton in Lincolnshire.

Barry’s most novel stroke was the internal cortile in the centre of the plan, with the halls and landings arranged like arcades round it. This enabled light to reach the depths of the interior, including the kitchen, scullery and Still Room in the basement.

The building was constructed by Stokes (Paxton’s son-in-law); it was roofed in 1831 and first used to watch William IV’s Coronation procession. It was completed in 1832.

Barry’s architecture has always been cherished by The Travellers, which, over the decades, has allowed art and architecture students to visit and make measured drawings. There was only one blip in the record: Barry remained the club architect throughout his life, but after him, Hungerford Pollen advised. He was Cockerell’s nephew.

In order to allow in more light, Pollen removed Barry’s balconies from the library windows in 1867 and replaced them with ‘Baker Street’ iron balustrades. Following furious protests, not least from Barry’s younger son and biographer Edward, the club reinstated the balconies to the original design. Suitably chastened, it never attempted to alter the elevations again.

Over the years, several changes have been made to the interior. A fire in 1850 destroyed Barry’s billiard room and the Elgin plaster frieze. In 1910, the Coffee Room was moved up to the first-floor drawing room (Fig 3) to create a ground-floor Smoking Room.

The entrance hall was also tactfully extended, reusing Barry’s windows and chimneypiece into the cortile by the then club architect Macvicar Anderson. Few realise this not part of the original Barry design.

Anderson added upper storeys of bedrooms after the First World War. In the early 20th century, the club benefitted from the care and knowledge of a member, Hal Goodhart-Rendal, who, for a time, also acted as the club architect. He recommended Fred Rowntree as his successor and Rowntree designed the handsome First and Second World War Memorials and restored the club after it suffered bomb damage in 1940.

Goodhart-Rendal had restored and replicated the Colza chandeliers and other light fittings and produced a design for roofing over the main floor of the cortile to make a ‘saloon’. This was not proceeded with, nor was its revival in 1970 by Ian Grant, chairman of the Victorian Society, although he was responsible for re-graining the library in its original oak with a grant from the Greater London Council Historic Buildings Division.

This was one of several late-20th-century restorations of original decorative schemes, including the repainting of the Coffee Room in Barry’s yellows and greys in 1988. The library remains the heart of the club and, as well as being one of the most beautiful rooms in London, it contains the finest collection of travel books in private hands, donated by members over two centuries. Its present flourishing condition with lectures and exhibitions attests to the continuing vigour of The Travellers after 200 years.

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The Last Palace of the Champs Elysées: A Courtesan’s Secret Alcazar

Hiding in plain sight, you’re looking into the eye of the last remaining example of the magnificent private mansions that once lined the Champs Élysées in Paris. Hotel de la Païva was built by a famous 19th century courtesan who came from humble beginnings in the ghetto of Moscow. Esther Lachmann, aka La Païva, became one of the most infamous women in mid-19th-century France, at a time when there was a bewildering array of categories of prostitutes that ranged from street-walkers and sex workers in brothels to courtesans and kept women. La Païva, was one of the very lucky ones indeed…

The story of her rise to become the “the queen of kept women” is still as juicy and shocking as it was then, well over a century later. By the age of 17, she was married with a son, but left her first husband shortly after giving and travelled to Berlin, Vienna, Istanbul, London and Paris. She became the mistress of a well-known French pianist, before she drove him to financial ruin and was cast out of his home. In London, during the French Revolution, she turned her attention to the British aristocracy and wealthy bankers. While making love to them, Esther allegedly demanded they burn thousand franc banknotes. She met her second husband, Albino Francisco de Araújo de Paiva, at a German spa, but no less than a day after the wedding, she gave him a letter…

“You have obtained the object of your desire and have succeeded in making me your wife … I, on the other hand, have acquired your name, and we can cry quits. I have acted my part honestly and without disguise, and the position I aspired to I have gained; but as for you, Mons. de Paiva, you are saddled with a wife of foulest repute, whom you can introduce to no society, for no one will receive her. Let us part; go back to your country; I have your name, and will stay where I am” Esther Lachmann

Amazingly, he did as he was told and returned to his country, leaving her with his apartment and £40,000. Païva later committed suicide.

Soon after, she met a young Prussian industrialist and mining magnate, Count Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck, and followed him around Europe, pretending to bump into him at social events. She became his mistress for nearly 20 years before they finally married and began constructing the legendary Hotel de la Païva.

As the story goes, when Esther was a young courtesan in the making, an angry customer had thrown her out of his carriage on the pavement of the Champs-Élysées. It was then that she vowed she would one day build the most beautiful house on the famous avenue in revenge of all the men who had mistreated her. Her new husband was one of Europe’s richest men and paid for the mansion that is thought to have cost the modern-day equivalent of nearly a billion dollars.

A young Auguste Rodin was hired as one of the sculptors while Paul Baudry, who had just painted the Opera Garnier, got to work on the frescoes. The yellow Algerian onyx staircase is the only one like it in the world and helped classify the mansion as a historic monument. In the Moorish bathrooms, is a magnificent Napoleon III style bathtub, also in yellow onyx, where La Païva is said to have chosen between three taps which released milk, lime-blossom, and champagne for bathwater. The opulent tub has been left intact to this day and there are indeed, three taps.

Her house parties were just as legendary as the décor. As Paris’s most extravagant hostess, she held wild soirées and literary salons attended by the likes of Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola and Eugène Delacroix. But whether she was very well-liked by any of her guests is another story. She was often heard shamelessly boasting about her obscene wealth, and in her later years, accounts of La Païva are noticeably less flattering.

One count noted, “she is painted and powdered like an old tightrope walker… the reddish hair under her arms showing each time that she adjusted her shoulder straps … [and] she has slept with everyone …”

The Goncourt brothers, diarists of the Second Empire, wrote that, “on the surface, the face is that of a courtesan who will not be too old for her profession when she is a hundred years old; but underneath, another face is visible from time to time, the terrible face of a painted corpse.”

Historically, accounts of courtesans are notoriously unfavourable, and coming from an empire with notoriously loose morals to begin with, we’d be wise to remember to take everything said about La Païva with a pinch of salt. But Paris was soon to be at the centre of the Franco-Prussian War and for its most famous celebrity prostitute, notable investor, architecture patron and collector of jewels, with a Prussian husband to boot, her reign had come to an end. Suspected of espionage, she fled with her Prussian Count to Germany, where La Païva died at the age of 64. Unable to part with his wife, the devastated Count had Esther’s body embalmed in alcohol and stored in the attic of their winter palace – only for his second wife to discover years later.

Back in Paris, the Hotel de la Païva was left empty and abandoned for decades after the war until it found new tenants in 1904. Today, the mansion has functioned as The Travellers Club for over a century, a gentlemen’s club that was all-male until recently and rarely opens up to the public.

Perhaps our favourite room in the house is the Jardin d’Hiver (winter garden), which was recently restored to its former glory in 2018 after nearly a century of neglect.

The gentlemen’s club offers bedrooms on the top floors and private dining rooms for its members, as well as an elegant backgammon lounge and bar beside the winter salon. The mansion can on rare occasions, also be hired for private events, which is how we ended up here.

Its visitor’s book is filled with the names of ex-Presidents, explorers and high-powered businessmen who have sought refuge there and its one of the only places in Paris where one can smoke freely inside. There are still only bathroom facilities for men, and despite being of the wrong sex, it’s unlikely we’ll ever enjoy walking into a men’s room as much as this again…

Tucked away to the side of a restaurant, which now occupies the front courtyard, the quietly existing Hotel de la Païva is a place where time has undoubtedly stopped, in stark contrast to the changing face of the busy Avenue des Champs-Elysées.

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Last Updated on July 16, 2021 by Elizabeth Atanassova

Pall Mall, South Side, Existing Buildings: The Travellers' Club

Survey of London: Volumes 29 and 30, St James Westminster, Part 1 . Originally published by London County Council, London, 1960.

This free content was digitised by double rekeying . All rights reserved.

'Pall Mall, South Side, Existing Buildings: The Travellers' Club', Survey of London: Volumes 29 and 30, St James Westminster, Part 1 , (London, 1960), pp. 399-408. British History Online https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols29-30/pt1/pp399-408 [accessed 19 June 2024].

. "Pall Mall, South Side, Existing Buildings: The Travellers' Club", in Survey of London: Volumes 29 and 30, St James Westminster, Part 1 , (London, 1960) 399-408. British History Online , accessed June 19, 2024, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols29-30/pt1/pp399-408.

. "Pall Mall, South Side, Existing Buildings: The Travellers' Club", Survey of London: Volumes 29 and 30, St James Westminster, Part 1 , (London, 1960). 399-408. British History Online . Web. 19 June 2024, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols29-30/pt1/pp399-408.

In this section

The travellers' club, architectural description, the exterior, the interior.

The Travellers' Club was founded in 1819. Its object was 'to form a point of re-union for gentlemen who had travelled abroad; and to afford them the opportunity of inviting, as Honorary Visitors, the principal members of all the foreign missions and travellers of distinction'. (fn. 4) Several writers have attributed the first suggestion for such a club to Lord Castlereagh, who was then Foreign Secretary and who may very possibly have been the originator of the idea. (fn. 1) No first-hand evidence on this point has, however, been found. Castlereagh was a member of the club from its foundation in 1819 until his death in 1822. During this period he did not attend any of the meetings of the committee of management, and appears to have taken no part in the formation and administration of the club. (fn. 5)

The first entry in the club minutes records that at a meeting held on 5 May 1819 a committee of twenty-four peers and gentlemen was established 'to make the necessary Arrangements for the proposed Club'. (fn. 6) This bald record, which mentions neither those present nor the place of meeting, suggests that there may have been previous (and unrecorded) discussions at which the foundation of the club had already been determined. The members of the first committee included the Earl of Aberdeen (1784–1860), Prime Minister 1852–5; Lord Auckland (1784–1849), subsequently Governor-General of India; Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865), Foreign Secretary 1830–41, 1846– 1851 and Prime Minister 1855–8, 1859–65; J. B. S. Morritt (? 1772–1843), traveller and classical scholar; Sir Gore Ouseley (1770–1844), diplomatist and oriental scholar; W. R. Hamilton (1777–1859), antiquary and diplomatist, who as secretary to Lord Elgin had superintended the removal to England of the Elgin marbles in 1802; Lieutenant-Colonel W. M. Leake (1777–1860), classical topographer and numismatist, who had accompanied Hamilton on his journey to England with the Elgin marbles; Robert Hay, who may perhaps be identified with the Egyptian traveller and archaeologist (1799–1863) of that name; and C. R. Cockerell (1788–1863), architect, who had studied architectural remains in Greece, Asia Minor and Italy and had in 1812 discovered the frieze of the temple of Apollo at Phigaleia. (fn. 7)

The first meeting of the committee was held on 12 May 1819, when it was' Resolved Unanimously That the Club be called The Travellers' Club'. During the next few weeks the committee was busy framing rules and electing members, and in June an agreement for the lease of No. 12 Waterloo Place was signed. The first secretary was Charles Beloe, who for a salary of 120 guineas agreed 'to attend an hour or two at least every day and during the greater part of any one day every week'; (fn. 2) the day-to-day catering and domestic management of the club was done by a steward and his wife. The club-house was opened for members' use on 18 August 1819, and eight days later the first letters inviting distinguished foreigners to use the club as visitors were sent to Count Woronzow, the former Russian ambassador, and to his son Count Michael Woronzow. (fn. 5)

In August 1820 the committee refused a building site in Regent Street which John Nash had offered for the erection of a club-house, but the search for a permanent home continued and in November the secretary wrote to the landlord of No. 12 Waterloo Place that the 'Club are not at all likely to retain their present House, should any other more eligible present itself'. (fn. 8) In June 1821 two architects, Joseph Kay and Henry Harrison, reported that owing to failures on the south and east fronts, the house was unsafe, and shortly afterwards the committee purchased the lease of No. 49 Pall Mall, on the north side, opposite to the present Oxford and Cambridge University Club. This house had formerly been occupied by William Almack as a tavern, and subsequently by Brooks's Club until its removal to St. James's Street in 1778 (see page 327). The alterations made to this house were carried out by Mr. Robertson, architect, and Mr. Rickman was the contractor. In October the secretary was 'directed to accompany Mr. Robertson to Brighton for the purpose of examining Mahomeds Baths', and presumably as a result of this perambulation baths were installed at a cost of £88. Casts of two Greek friezes are mentioned as part of the ornamentation of the new house and the Travellers' was thus probably the first London club to use a decorative motif which was later employed at the Athenaeum, the Reform and elsewhere. (fn. 9)

The club appears to have moved to No. 49 Pall Mall in the spring of 1822, (fn. 10) and it remained there until the completion of its permanent home in 1832. A member has described the building as 'a shabby, low-roomed house. . . . But what we lost in good accommodation, we gained in good company. We never enjoyed each other's society so much after we shifted our quarters to the big house on the other side of the way.' (fn. 11)

In 1826 the decision to demolish Carlton House provided the club with an opportunity to obtain a suitably spacious building site, and at a general meeting held on 22 May the club authorized its committee to negotiate for a lease of part of Carlton House grounds. (fn. 12) In July John Nash, the architect to the Commissioners of Woods and Forests, proposed a site, probably on the south side of Pall Mall, which the Club provisionally accepted. (fn. 13) There matters remained for about a year, during which the positions of the houses of the United Service Club and the Athenaeum were decided and the erection of the former was begun.

In June 1827 the secretary of the Commissioners of Woods and Forests enquired whether the Travellers' Club would be prepared to enter into an agreement for the erection of a house on the south side of Pall Mall; in a second letter a few days later he promised possession of the site within one year of the conclusion of terms. The committee decided to postpone making a final answer until the following spring, and the Commissioners agreed not to dispose of the site until after Lady Day 1828. (fn. 14) The cause of this prevarication was probably the committee's hope of purchasing Buckingham House, on the south side of Pall Mall, for which the club offered £25,000. (fn. 15) Abortive negotiations with the Duke of Buckingham's agent continued until the end of 1827 but on 26 March 1828 the secretary wrote to the Commissioners accepting the proposed plot on the south side of Pall Mall. (fn. 16)

This ground occupied the sites of three houses numbered 105–107, and had a frontage of some eighty-five feet to Pall Mall; (fn. 17) its eastern side was some twenty feet west of the western wall of the Athenaeum club-house.

At a general meeting of the club on 5 May 1828 the committee was authorized to 'procure Plans from not less than five eminent architects for the New House', such plans to be submitted to the final choice of another general meeting. (fn. 18) The originator of this, the first architectural competition (albeit in a very limited form) to be held by a London club, may have been Lieutenant-Colonel (later General Sir) Edward Cust (1794–1878), who was a member of the club and later chairman of its building committee. During his membership of the House of Commons from 1818 to 1832, Cust took an active interest in the public architectural works of the time and 'succeeded in securing a system for the competition of public buildings, under which he was named a commissioner for rebuilding the Houses of Parliament'. (fn. 19)

On 7 May the committee requested the chairman, Lord Granville Somerset, to write to a number of architects 'to ascertain whether you will feel any objection to furnish, in competition with a few other eminent Architects, Plans for the erection of a new Club House on the South Side of Pall Mall, such plans to be prepared and submitted to the Committee on or before the 1st of July next'. The architects were Robert Smirke, William Wilkins, John Peter Deering, William Atkinson, Decimus Burton and Benjamin Wyatt. (fn. 20) Smirke, Burton and Lewis Wyatt (who also must have received an invitation) all declined, and a week later similar invitations were sent to Jeffry Wyatville (who also declined), Henry Harrison, Thomas Hopper and Charles Barry. A request from Edward Blore to be allowed to compete was granted by the committee, but no decision was taken on a similar request from Ambrose Poynter. (fn. 21)

On 1 July plans were received from seven architects—Barry, Blore, Deering, Harrison, Hopper, Wilkins and Benjamin Wyatt; an eighth and anonymous plan was probably by Poynter. The committee referred the plans to J. H. Good, surveyor to the Commissioners for Building New Churches, for his opinion of their likely expense, and on 17 July the plans were submitted to a general meeting of the club. The attendance, however, was so small that it was decided to leave the choice of design and architect to the committee, which was to report to another general meeting 'previous to the Signing of the Contract with the Builder'. (fn. 22) At the end of July the eight competing architects were each interviewed by the committee, and the decision in favour of Barry was made at a meeting on 20 August. (fn. 23)

A large volume of Barry's drawings, collected by his pupil Edward Barrett and very recently acquired by the Royal Institute of British Architects, contains two highly finished sections belonging to a design for the Travellers' Club. As the east—west section shows a building some eightyfive feet wide, it is clear that these drawings relate to Barry's first design for a club-house on the site of Nos. 105–107 Pall Mall. No plans have as yet come to light, but the deep north-south section offers ample evidence of the interior arrangement. This section is taken through the vestibule, presumably at the east end of the Pall Mall front, with the morning-room occupying the rest of the frontage. The vestibule, consisting of two saucerdomed square compartments, leads south to an ante with a three-bay Ionic screen opening west to the great staircase, rising round three sides of an oblong well. South of the staircase-ante is another saucer-domed compartment, forming an ante to the coffee-room, which the east-west section shows as a large oblong room divided into three compartments by double screens of Ionic columns, each compartment having a Venetian window in the south side. The great staircase rises to the principal (second) storey, into an ante with a Corinthian screen. This ante leads north to the library, on the Pall Mall front, and south through a small lobby to the lofty drawing-room, similar to the coffee-room but dressed with a rich Corinthian order. A secondary stair, south of the great staircase, rises to a mezzanine and to the third storey, the front rooms of which are not assigned on the drawing, but the east-west section shows a central ante-room, serving a billiard-room on the east and a smoking-room on the west. The billiardroom is treated in a manner recalling Soane, but the smoking-room is exotic and Moorish, with cusped windows and slender columns supporting a cove, out of which rises an onion-shaped lantern-light.

In December 1828 the Commissioners of Woods and Forests informed the club that as one of the houses on the site was used 'for accommodating a part of his Majesty's domestic Establishment, and may be required for that purpose for some time to come', the Commissioners could not recommend the Treasury to grant a lease of the site to the club. At an interview between Lord Lowther, First Commissioner of Woods and Forests, and Colonel Cust, the former offered the club the site of the three houses numbered 106–108 immediately to the west of the Athenaeum, instead of the site of Nos. 105–107, one house further west. The club naturally objected to this proposal, which reduced their frontage to Pall Mall from eighty-five to seventy-three feet, and placed their new building immediately against that of the Athenaeum. But there was no alternative to acceptance, and at a general meeting on 11 February 1829 at which Barry exhibited a sketch of a new plan for the smaller site, it was decided to agree to the Commissioners' proposal. On 6 May a building committee was established. (fn. 24)

In the library of the Royal Institute of British Architects there are two elevations signed by Barry and dated 4 March 1829 which may represent his original design as modified to fit the smaller frontage (Plate 84). These drawings appear to have been seen by the committee of the Athenaeum, for on 7 March the secretary of that club wrote to the Commissioners of Woods and Forests protesting that the height and protruding cornice of the proposed building would overlay its neighbour, and reminding them that as the height of the Athenaeum club-house had been prescribed by the Commissioners as part of a general plan for the whole street, it would be a great hardship if an adjoining building were allowed a greater height. (fn. 25)

This protest appears to have met with the Commissioners' sympathy, and may have been made known to the Travellers' Club, for on 4 May a design for a building somewhat lower than that provided in the drawings of 4 March was signed by Lord Granville Somerset, Colonel Cust and another member of the committee. (fn. 3) On 6 May a set of plans and elevations which presumably embodied this important modification was sent to the Commissioners for their approval. (fn. 25) But the Commissioners objected—'the difference in the Level of the Stories, range of the windows and projecting Cornices of the two Houses, apparent upon the said Drawings, would be objectionable and especially to the appearance of the Athenaeum Club House'—and suggested that Barry should confer with Decimus Burton 'with a view to the adoption of some measure likely to obviate those objections'. (fn. 26)

On 25 May Barry reported to the committee that 'having considered the Effect of the dissimilarity in the external appearance of the two Club Houses . . . I am clearly of opinion that as a matter of taste such dissimilarity is desirable. An intervening space of blank wall between the Houses would undoubtedly improve their effect, and although the character and proportions of the Travellers' Elevation would to a certain degree suffer by any diminution of their frontage, I consider that of less consequence than allowing the two Buildings immediately to adjoin each other, and I would therefore recommend the giving up of four feet of the frontage of the Travellers' House as to external appearance in order to obtain a recess of that width, and eighteen inches in depth. . . . And I would further recommend that the back wall of such recess should not be carried to the full height of the adjoining buildings in order that their cornices may be returned upon the flank walls.' (fn. 25)

This report was forwarded to the Commissioners, who on 2 June replied that as the Athenaeum had been compelled to make the height of their building correspond with that of the United Service Club, 'it would not be fair towards the Athenaeum Club to allow a Building of the height shown in the Elevation proposed for the Travellers' Club House to be erected so near to the Athenaeum Club House as would be the Case, even with the recess proposed by Mr. Barry to be made between them'. The Athenaeum had asked to be allowed to inspect Barry's designs, and the Commissioners proposed to grant this request. (fn. 27)

During the next three weeks feeling seems to have run high. At an interview between Colonel Cust, chairman of the building committee, and Lord Lowther, First Commissioner of Woods and Forests, the latter suggested that the Travellers should confer with the Athenaeum, to which Colonel Cust retorted that 'they are not aware of any advantage that can result to either party from such a step', (fn. 28) and protested at the submission of their plans to the other club. (fn. 25) In a letter of 9 June to the Commissioners the secretary of the Athenaeum pointed out that the excessive height of the Travellers' façade was occasioned by the mezzanine floor being between the basement and the ground storey, and that as this mezzanine was only required for the accommodation of men servants who could just as well be put in the attics, it would be an easy matter to lower the overall height by omitting the mezzanine. This neighbourly piece of advice was probably not passed on to the Travellers, whose secretary wrote to the Commissioners on 13 June refusing 'to yield to another club a point which cannot in reality affect either its interests or convenience'. (fn. 25)

This defiance produced a sharp reminder from the Commissioners that 'one of the conditions upon which the ground has been agreed to be let . . . is, that the Buildings shall be erected according to plans and elevations to be previously approved by this Board'. At a general meeting of the club held on 25 June, Barry produced an amended elevation which was approved by the members and transmitted to the Commissioners; a covering letter stated that by reducing the level of each floor the cornice had been brought below that of the Athenaeum. To this design the Commissioners offered no objection, 'provided the Balconies to the Windows of the Principal Stories be made to range with those of the Athenaeum Club House'. The Travellers protested that this proviso would mean 'the total sacrifice of the principal advantages the Club expected to obtain in the proposed new House', and ultimately the proviso was withdrawn. (fn. 29)

In the Public Record Office there are two elevations of the club-house signed by Colonel Cust, the chairman of the building committee, and dated 17 July 1829; they evidently represent the design finally approved by the Commissioners. (fn. 30)

The lowest tender for the erection of the building was from H. Lee and Sons of Chiswell Street, for £19,688. At a general meeting of the club held on 2 December 1829 it was decided that the tender must be brought within the limit of £19,000, and one of the economies decided upon was the omission of the smoking-tower, which had appeared in Barry's drawings of 4 March 1829 and which was ultimately erected in 1842–3. In May 1830 the committee authorized unspecified alterations in the design of the principal entrance, and in June it decided to dispense with the enrichment of the ceilings throughout the building. (fn. 31) The building appears to have been ready for members' use in July 1832. (fn. 32) According to the secretary, writing in 1839, the cost of the building (exclusive of fittings and furniture) was £23,160, and including the latter, £29,557 16 s . (fn. 33) These figures probably do not include the architect's fee of £1471 13 s . (fn. 32)

The Travellers' club-house (Plates 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93) was described in 1851 by John Weale, the architectural publisher, as 'a structure that fairly makes an epoch in the architectural history of club-houses, as being almost the first, if not the very first, attempt to introduce into this country that species of rich astylar composition which has obtained the name of the Italian palazzo mode, by way of contradistinction from Palladianism and its orders. Grecianism, Nashism, and Smirkeism had been exhausted, when, in an auspicious hour, both for himself and for architectural design, Charles Barry seized upon a style that had all along been quite overlooked by English architects.' (fn. 34)

The smoking-room, which had been included in all Barry's designs but whose erection had been omitted on grounds of economy, was added to the south front in 1842–3 ; (fn. 35) Barry's Academy diploma design of 1841 (Plate 85b) shows the garden front of the club with this proposed addition.

The internal decoration of the house, which had been very economically done in 1832, was completed in 1843 under Barry's superintendence, some of the painting being executed by the German artist Frederick Sang. (fn. 35) These decorations were severely criticized in The Athenaeum , which inveighed against 'the employment of affectations and unrealities, which abound everywhere—sham granite walls, sham marbled columns and dados, sham bronze doors, sham bas-reliefs'. Even the ceiling of the hall was painted in imitation of granite, while the carpet of the drawing-room was said to be 'just the carpet you would chance to find adorning the drawing-room of a flourishing cheesemonger in Aldgate or the Minories'. The work as a whole gave the impression of being 'the work of a committee, where there had been a compromise to suit everyone's taste, and each member had undertaken the independent arrangement of different parts'. (fn. 36)

On 24 October 1850 a fire broke out in the billiard-room, and considerable damage was sustained. (fn. 37) The structure was restored under Charles Barry's direction; (fn. 38) some of his plans for this work are now in the library of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

In 1867 the committee decided that the ornamental stone balustrades to the three windows of the library obstructed the light, and replaced them with thin iron railings. E. M. Barry wrote in December to The Builder to protest at these 'common bulging iron railings, of a design which I can only describe as Baker-street vernacular'. (fn. 39) The club had not obtained the permission of the Commissioners of Woods and Forests for the removal of the balustrades, and after E. M. Barry had drawn their attention to the matter, James Pennethorne, the Commissioners' architect, was asked for a report. He stated that 'connoisseurs in Architecture must be offended, and that great injury would be done to the reputation of Sir Charles Barry if the iron railings were allowed to remain; also considering how little good Architecture there is in London, and how much care is bestowed in the first instance upon the selection of a design for these Club Houses . . . I think it is incumbent upon the Crown . . . to protect such Buildings from mutilation'. The Commissioners therefore requested the club to reinstate the balustrades, and after E. M. Barry had provided a copy of his father's original designs the work was performed by Messrs. Cubitt in the summer of 1868. (fn. 40)

The library itself (Plate 92c) appears to have assumed its present appearance in 1868. In April 1831, when the building was in course of erection, Barry altered his designs for the room (fn. 41) and in c . 1838 a partition (the position of which is not clear) was removed. (fn. 42) W. H. Leeds, writing in 1839, states that 'The columns and every other part of the Library are painted of a wainscot or pale oak colour.' (fn. 43) With the passage of time the colour of the woodwork darkened and in 1867–8 the whole room was apparently redecorated and the columns painted white, probably in the hope of obtaining more light. Members' reactions to this change varied considerably; one maintained that 'If, instead of dark oak columns, the interior was white with gilding, it would be perfectly light. The present "decoration" is simply a Mauvaise Plaisanterie', while another castigated the committee for 'spoiling one of the most charming libraries in the country by turning the oaken columns into white and gold ones and by putting Prints before the bookcases. . . . The Library looks more like a French Restaurant than a Library.' (fn. 40)

In 1903 a special general meeting of the club decided to enlarge the entrance hall by taking in the western bay of the central court. (fn. 44) This was not done till 1911, when other important alterations were made. The first-floor room overlooking Pall Mall was converted into a dining-room, and the partition was removed. (fn. 45) Improved sleeping accommodation for the servants was provided by throwing out three exceedingly unsightly dormer windows on the garden front. The designs for these alterations were by J. Macvicar Anderson.

In 1930–1 two new storeys were built over the existing billiard-rooms; H. L. Anderson was the architect. In October 1940 the club-house was severely damaged by enemy action, a number of bedrooms being gutted. The top floors were reinstated in 1952–3 to the designs of Fred Rowntree and Sons; the dormer windows on the south front were removed, the space which they occupied in the roof being ingeniously used to provide light for the bedrooms.

The Travellers' Club is the first of Sir Charles Barry's masterpieces, a remarkably mature and brilliant work for a man of only thirty-four years, and one which exhibits most of his virtues and few of his faults. It may be felt that his refusal to conform with the stringcourse and cornice lines of the Athenaeum, already established by Burton, was a blow to the rule of uniformity in street architecture, but Rome, Florence, Venice and Genoa offered good precedent for Barry's nonconformity. His was the initial step taken in transforming Pall Mall into a strada di palazzi , variously echoing, with increasingly Victorian overtones, the masterpieces of Renaissance Italy.

His plan, too, broke with established precedent (Plates 86, 87). He did not attempt to arrange the rooms in a symmetrical pattern round a great central staircase hall, as in the Waterloo Place club-houses. Instead, he disposed them in a most convenient sequence round three sides of a square court, with a corridor link along the fourth (west) side. This court, architecturally treated as a true Italian cortile , brought light and air to the inside rooms, particularly those in the deep basement and mezzanine.

The ground floor of the north (Pall Mall) range contains the entrance hall on the west, and the morning-room on the east. The wide corridor, on the west side of the court, leads from the entrance hall to the principal staircase, on the south side of the court, and to the smoking-room (originally the coffee-room), a long room of three compartments fronting south. Beyond the principal staircase is a lobby leading to the house dining-room, a square apartment on the east side of the court. The library is on the first floor, above the smoking-room, and over the morningroom and hall is the coffee-room, formed out of the original drawing-room and card-room. There are two storeys above the rooms on the south and east sides of the court, but these are of little interest.

It was probably W. H. Leeds, writing in 1839, who first compared the Pall Mall front of the Travellers' Club with Raphael's posthumously built Palazzo Pandolfini in Florence, but he did so only to draw attention to the superior merits of Barry's design. This flattering comparison has, however, become something of a boomerang, returning to Barry as a charge of plagiarism. There is some resemblance between the two buildings, but on examination it will be found to be a matter of similarity in composition, and the composition of the Travellers' front arises quite logically out of the plan. In detail, however, there is little resemblance, for Barry's design is quite eclectic in inspiration, and highly personal in realization. His surviving earlier designs, of March and May 1829, are quite unlike the Pandolfini for they show the four windows and doorway of the ground storey as round-arched openings recessed in a rusticated arcade with plain spandrels, and in the March design the balustrades of the first-floor tabernacle frames form balconies projecting on heavy flat brackets. The executed design is strongly foreshadowed in the drawing signed by the chairman of the building committee on 17 July 1829, except that here the doorway is emphasized with a doorcase of Doric columns supporting an entablature, its frieze ornamented with triglyphs. Barry's eclecticism is even more evident in the garden front, where the composition is quite Venetian, reminiscent of Pietro Lombardi's Palazzo Corner-Spinelli, yet the crowning entablature is of the bracketed form favoured by Vignola. The design approved on 17 July 1829 is much simpler than that executed, particularly in the ground storey, and it shows the smokingtower appearing above the roof as a small belvedere asymmetrically placed, more or less behind the pier between the two easternmost windows of the front.

Both fronts are faced with stucco, except for the quoins on the Pall Mall front. These, and possibly the crowning cornicione , are of stone, or 'stone concrete'. (fn. 46)

The Pall Mall front (Plates 88, 89a, 89b) is an astylar composition of two lofty storeys, both presenting a plain face with five strongly articulated and evenly spaced windows, the entrance doorway taking the place of the westernmost ground-storey window. Each storey is bounded by long-and-short chamfered quoins, and a plain pedestal-course links the window-aprons. A massive balustrade of stone, raised on a double plinth and composed of square-section balusters grouped between solid dies, encloses the front area and conceals the mezzanine storey which raises the ground floor well above the pavement level. The groundstorey windows are uniformly dressed, each with a moulded and slightly eared architrave, a narrow pulvinated frieze, and a plain cornice, the architrave rising from a moulded sill which rests on the consoles flanking the panelled apron. The doorcase is similar, but the architrave is wider, the frieze is omitted, and the bold dentilled cornice rests on scrolled consoles. A cornice-stringcourse, ornamented with a guilloche band, finishes the ground storey. Each second-storey window is recessed within a rich tabernacle frame (very like those of the Palazzo Regio in Venice) with fluted Corinthian pilasters supporting a triangular pedimented entablature, the frieze pulvinated and the cornice enriched with bracket-modillions. The pilasters, which have return faces on the window reveals, rest on panelled pedestals flanking an open balustrade of waisted balusters. The splendid cornicione , crowning the front, has a frieze-band of paterae within a guilloche, a course of dentils and one of bracket-modillions, and the cymatium is ornamented with lion-head stops. A link with the dying Georgian tradition is provided by the windows, which are sashes divided into elegantly proportioned panes by slender glazing-bars.

The garden front (Plates 85, 89c) is light and elegant, and the storeys are more sharply contrasted in treatment. Each contains five windows—three closely grouped in the middle and one isolated on either side. The ground storey is stuccoed to resemble smooth-faced rusticated masonry, with vermiculated long-and-short stones dressing the straight-headed windows and forming the quoins. Finishing this storey is a flattened entablature which breaks into a Vignolesque bracketed entablature to support the three balconies of the second-storey windows. Here the face is mock-jointed and bounded by long-andshort chamfered quoins. A pedestal-course links the balconies, their fronts being perforated with a pattern of interlacing circles, extending between narrow pedestals with raised panelled dies and finials in the Venetian manner. The casement windows have straight heads, but each is surmounted by a shell tympanum and set in a roundarched recess, framed by fluted pilasters with Corinthianesque capitals (perhaps derived from the sea-storey order of the Palazzo Vendramini) and an archivolt enriched with formalized leaves. These pilasters are also returned into the window reveals, and the arch soffit is adorned with a guilloche band. Instead of a cornicione , this front is finished with a Vignolesque entablature, consisting of a guilloche-ornamented architrave, and a frieze of raised square diamante panels set between the console-brackets that support the boldly projecting cornice. Above the cornice the roof slopes gently back to the balustraded flat in front of the smoking-room, a belvedere-like feature added by Barry in 1842–3 (Plate 85b). This has an arcaded front of seven bays, the middle five closely spaced and containing windows. Each end arch breaks slightly forward between wide piers, and frames a niche. The piers are plain, but the arches have moulded archivolts broken by plain keystones, and the whole is finished with a dentilled cornice. The hipped roof of Roman tiles is broken at each end by large chimney-stacks, each comprised of five separate shafts united by a simple entablature.

The entrance hall, although quite small, is treated in a monumental manner. Each side is divided into three bays by a plain-shafted Doric order, pilasters on the west side and columns on the east which form a screen to the narrow aisle containing the porter's desk, etc. The walls are coursed with channelled joints, and the ceiling is a barrel-vault patterned with small square coffers. A few steps opposite the doorway ascend through an archway to a small ante, square in plan and ceiled with a saucer-dome on pendentives. This ante is open also on its east and south sides, the east archway leading through a square lobby to the morning-room. The south archway opens to the west corridor which is divided into three arcaded bays by pilasters, with panelled shafts and Doric caps, the last forming imposts for the panelled ribs dividing the barrel-vaulted ceiling into oblong compartments, each containing a large square panel besides the small spandrel panels flanking the groined intersections of the side arches. This corridor is now open on its east side to a waitingroom built over part of the court, and its south end wall, with a doorway to the staircase compartment, has been removed to improve the circulation and extend the vista.

The staircase (Plate 92a) is spacious enough, but appears modest when compared with those in the Waterloo Place clubs. It is contained in an oblong compartment, two storeys high, on the south side of the court, the stairs rising in a single broad flight to a half-landing broken by two steps, and continuing in a return flight to the first-floor landing, with a gallery over the first flight leading to the back stairs. The design of the staircase recalls the Italianate examples of the Jones-PrattWebb school, having a wide architrave string, square pedestal newels, and massive balusters supporting a broad moulded cornice-handrail, all of mahogany (the grip-handrail of oak was added to assist Talleyrand in ascending the stairs). At the side of the lower flight is a finely carved spandrel panel of rich acanthus scrollwork, and the landing gallery rests on scrolled consolecantilevers. The staircase compartment, however, is not strictly Caroline in style, although it accords well enough with the stairs. The walls of the ground-floor stage are of plaster, formed into large fielded panels in the style of woodwork, but the first-floor stage is arcaded, with three roundheaded arches on each side wall, those on the north side framing windows. There is an elliptical arch modelled on each end wall, and an open arch of the same form between the stair and landing compartments. A modillioned cornice surrounds each ceiling, that over the stair-well having a shallow coffered saucer-dome between two oblong panels, each containing three square coffers. Recent cleaning of the dome has revealed arabesque paintings in the coffers, presumably part of the elaborate decorations carried out in 1843 by Frederick Sang, under Barry's directions. The oblong ceiling over the landing is formed as an oval saucer-dome on pendentives. The wall facing the foot of the stairs is decorated with an arch, framing a large glass reflecting the staircase, and in the wall of the landing above is a niche containing a statue apparently based on the Medici Venus, but with the position of the arms reversed. The first-floor west corridor is generally similar to that on the ground floor, but it retains unaltered its three round-headed windows overlooking the court (Plate 92b). These, and the similar windows lighting the staircase compartment, are divided by slender glazing-bars and have marginal surrounds formed of small circles glazed with patterned frosted glass.

The three rooms on the ground floor vary in size and shape but all are decorated in a simple Grecian style. The walls, generally, are divided by raised mouldings into large panels, with a low pedestal dado below, and an architrave and modillioned cornice above. The ceilings are treated with large slightly recessed oblong panels containing square coffers. The oblong morningroom is 24 feet 6 inches wide and 43 feet 6 inches long, including the east end recess. The three evenly spaced windows in the Pall Mall side wall are balanced by the large flush panels on the opposite wall and both have narrow sunk panels between them. At the east end is a wide, shallow bay, framed by antae and containing a fireplace. This has a figured black marble chimneypiece of simple design, with Doric pilaster jambs, a plain lintel and a cornice-shelf, over which is a tall oblong glass in a moulded frame. A similar chimneypiece and glass is centred in the opposite end wall. The arrangement of the ceiling panels echoes that of the walls, with three large squares flanked by oblongs and separated by narrow oblongs (Plate 90a).

Sliding double doors (a modern alteration) open from the morning-room to the house dining-room, an almost square apartment measuring 29 feet by 27 feet, with three round-arched windows in the west wall overlooking the court. The fireplace, central in the east wall, has a chimneypiece similar to those in the morning-room, and the walls generally are divided into large panels, now filled with a damask-patterned paper. The ceiling is divided by plain intersecting ribs into nine almost square panels (Plate 90b).

The smoking-room (originally the coffee-room) is 67 feet 6 inches long and 24 feet 6 inches wide. True to tradition, it is divided into three compartments—short, long, and short, the east compartment prolonged by a shallow bay—linked by wide openings between engaged piers which have panelled shafts and simple Doric caps. There is one window in each end compartment, and a group of three in the middle. The three fireplaces, one in each end wall and one opposite the middle window, are all furnished with black marble chimneypieces like those in the morning-room. Full-length portraits, one by Gainsborough and four by Angelica Kauffmann, adorn the wall panels; a small landscape hangs over each end chimneypiece; and over the middle one is a fine looking-glass in a rich gilt frame of Chineserococo design (Plate 91).

On the first floor, and fronting to Pall Mall, is the present coffee-room (Plate 93), comprising two rooms originally linked by sliding doors in the dividing wall, which has been removed save for a narrow margin now dressed on either side with a moulded architrave. The east compartment was the card-room, 24 feet 6 inches wide and 27 feet long, including the recess at the east end. The west compartment was the drawing-room, of the same width but 40 feet 6 inches long. Both are consistent in their decoration, which shows a strong reflection of Henry Holland's 'Directoire' manner. The walls above the low pedestal-dado are divided by raised mouldings into tall panels with marginal frames, and are finished with a shallow plain frieze, originally with painted ornament, and an enriched cornice with dentils and bracket-modillions. A shallow cove, modelled with square coffers, surrounds the ceiling of each compartment, which consists of a single plain panel within a wide moulded border of which the chief feature is a double guilloche band. In each end wall is a fireplace with a white marble chimneypiece, its narrow architrave frame flanked by wide jambs composed of a guilloche panel between narrow pilaster-strips with consoles supporting a cornice-shelf above a guilloche-band frieze. Over each chimneypiece is a tall round-headed glass, in a plain white margin and a straight-headed gilt frame. There is a similar chimneypiece, without a glass, opposite the middle window of the west compartment.

According to W. H. Leeds the drawing- and card-rooms were originally 'fitted up and furnished in a style of quiet elegance . . . at once sober and cheerful in character. The doors and styles of the panels on the walls are tastefully painted and highly varnished in imitation of bird's-eye maple, and the panels themselves painted to resemble gilt leather of a flowered pattern on a white ground, and relieved by a plain gilt moulding.' (fn. 43)

The library (Plate 92c) is more or less identical in size with the smoking-room below, and is divided into three compartments by double screens, three bays wide, between narrow return walls faced with bookshelves. A Corinthian order is used, the fluted columns and square engaged pillars standing on high pedestals with panelled dies, the fronts opening to reveal cupboards. The pedestals are returned and continued across the narrow side bays of each screen, leaving only the middle bay open for access between the compartments. Bookshelves line the walls, even the narrow piers between the three windows of the middle compartment, and they are united with the screens by their architectural treatment. Elegant scrollconsoles form the divisions of the pedestal stage of the bookshelves, and the upper stage is finished with a simple entablature having a dentilled cornice, continuing that of the screens. Above is a deep frieze, plain in each end compartment, but in the middle adorned with casts of the frieze from the cella of the temple of Apollo at Bassae (Phigaleia), presumably those used to decorate the club's earlier rooms at No. 49 Pall Mall. In each end wall is a fireplace, its wooden chimneypiece having an eared architrave, laurel-banded frieze, and a cornice-shelf, above which is a large panel with a marginal frame. The chimneypiece in the middle compartment is larger and more elaborate, with fluted Corinthian columns supporting a cornice-shelf above a rich entablature, broken by a scrolled keyblock. The panel above, which contains a scallop-shell recess below a drapery swag, is modern and replaces the original bookshelves. The ceilings are twice coffered, with three squares within each large oblong. The present colouring of the room is largely white, with a terra-cotta ground to the Bassae frieze, but Leeds records the fact that the woodwork generally was grained 'of a wainscot or pale oak colour' (fn. 43) except for the central chimneypiece which was grained a dark oak.

Barry designed or selected much of the furniture, which is transitional Regency-Victorian in style and generally made of mahogany with horsehair upholstery. He also designed the lighting fittings of gilded metal, which were made for colza-oil lamps and have been most skilfully adapted for electric light. The finest, perhaps, is the great cluster of seven lamps on curving branches radiating from a vase-shaped reservoir, which is suspended by chains from the dome above the staircase. Noteworthy, too, is the cluster of lamps on a candelabrum base, rising from the pedestal newel at the foot of the stairs. The coffeeroom is illuminated by three splendid crystal chandeliers, or lustres, of late eighteenth-century design.

The cortile has suffered the most from change—the excessive heightening of the east and south sides, and the obscuration by outbuildings of part of the ground storey. Originally it was nearly square, some 26 feet each way, and two storeys high above the basement. Both storeys were arcaded, with three arches in each face framing windows or blank recesses, and each storey was finished with a full entablature, the upper one surmounted by a balustraded pedestal-parapet.

THE TRAVELLERS' CLUB

This famous Club was originated shortly after the Peace of 1814, by the Marquis of Londonderry (then Lord Castlereagh), with a view to a resort for gentlemen who had resided or travelled abroad, as well as with a view to the accommodation of foreigners, who, when properly recommended, receive an invitation for the period of their stay. One of the Rules directs "That no person be considered eligible to the Travellers' Club who shall not have travelled out of the British Islands to a distance of at least 500 miles from London in a direct line." Another Rule directs "That no dice and no game of hazard be allowed in the rooms of the Club, nor any higher stake than guinea points, and that no cards be introduced before dinner."

Prince Talleyrand, during his residence in London, generally joined the muster of whist-players at the Travellers'; probably, here was the scene of this felicitous rejoinder. The Prince was enjoying his rubber, when the conversation turned on the recent union of an elderly lady of respectable rank. "How ever could Madame de S—— make such a match?—a person of her birth to marry a valet-de-chambre !" "Ah," replied Talleyrand, "it was late in the game: at nine we don't reckon honours."

The present Travellers' Club-house, which adjoins the Athenæum in Pall-Mall, was designed by Barry, R.A., and built in 1832. It is one of the architect's most admired works. Yet, we have seen it thus treated, with more smartness than judgment, by a critic who is annoyed at its disadvantageous comparison with its more gigantic neighbours:—

"The Travellers' is worse, and looks very like a sandwich at the Swindon station—a small stumpy piece of beef between two huge pieces of bread, i.e. the Athenæum and the Reform Clubs, which look as if they were urging their migratory neighbour to resume the peregrinations for which its members are remarkable. Yet people have their names down ten years at the Travellers' previous to their coming up for ballot. An election reasonably extended would supply funds for a more advantageous and extended position."

The architecture is the nobler Italian, resembling a Roman palace: the plan is a quadrangle, with an open area in the middle, so that all the rooms are well lighted. The Pall-Mall front has a bold and rich cornice, and the windows are decorated with Corinthian pilasters: the garden front varies in the windows, but the Italian taste is preserved throughout, with the most careful finish: the roof is Italian tiles. To be more minute, the consent of all competent judges has assigned a very high rank to this building as a piece of architectural design; for if, in point of mere quantity , it fall greatly short of many contemporary structures, it surpasses nearly every one of them in quality , and in the artist-like treatment. In fact, it makes an epoch in our metropolitan architecture; for before, we had hardly a specimen of that nobler Italian style, which, instead of the flutter and flippery, and the littleness of manner, which pervade most of the productions of the Palladian school, is characterized by breath and that refined simplicity arising from unity of idea and execution, and from every part being consistently worked up, yet kept subservient to one predominating effect. Unfortunately, the south front, which is by far the more striking and graceful composition, is comparatively little seen, being that facing Carlton Gardens, and not to be approached so as to be studied as it deserves; but when examined, it certainly must be allowed to merit all the admiration it has obtained. Though perfect, quiet, and sober in effect, and unostentatious in character, this building of Barry's is remarkable for the careful finish bestowed on every part of it. It is this quality, together with the taste displayed in the design generally, that renders it an architectural bijou. Almost any one must be sensible of this, if he will but be at the pains to compare it with the United Service Club, eastward of which, as far as mere quantity goes, there is much more.

Another critic remarks: "The Travellers' fairly makes an epoch in the architectural history of Club-houses, as being almost the first, if not the very first, attempt, to introduce into this country that species of rich astylar composition which has obtained the name of the Italian palazzo mode, by way of contradistinction from Palladianism and its orders. This production of Barry's has given a fresh impulse to architectural design, and one in a more artistic direction; and the style adopted by the architect has been applied to various other buildings in the provinces as well as in the metropolis; and its influence has manifested itself in the taste of our recent street architecture."

The Travellers' narrowly escaped destruction on October 24, 1850, when a fire did great damage to the billiard-rooms, which were, by the way, an afterthought, and addition to the original building, but by no means an improvement upon the first design, for they greatly impaired the beauty of the garden-front.

John Timbs Club Life of London Vol. I London, 1866

© Stephen Hart 2023

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The Club was founded in 1819, 'for gentlemen who had travelled out of the British Isles to a distance of at least five hundred miles from London in a direct line'. Membership was extended to foreign visitors and diplomats posted to London.

The original concept of The Club dates from the return to peace in Europe following the Napoleonic Wars. The founders  envisaged a club where gentlemen who travelled abroad might meet and offer hospitality to distinguished foreign visitors. Arrangements for the establishment of The Club were finalised at a meeting in the spring of 1819, attended by distinguished diplomats, travellers and two future Prime Ministers (the Earl of Aberdeen and Viscount Palmerston).

The head of Ulysses was adopted as the Club symbol.

The Club was first housed at 12 Waterloo Place but soon outgrew the space and so moved to 49 Pall Mall. 

In 1826 money was raised to lease part of the grounds of Carlton House and Sir Charles Barry, who later designed the Houses of Parliament was appointed as architect.

Members have traditionally come from the diplomatic and foreign services, explorers, politics, journalism and the law.

Early membership of the Club was dominated by outstanding representatives of the Home Civil Service and the Diplomatic Service. The Armed Forces and British and Foreign royalty were also well represented, a tradition that still continues. His Majesty The King , The Duke of Edinburgh, The Duke of Kent and Prince Michael of Kent are among the Honorary Members. Founder members of the Club included Viscount Palmerston, Lords Auckland and Beauchamp. Many leading statesmen have been members of the Club, including Canning, Wellington, Palmerston, Balfour and Baldwin, as well as some of the great names of exploration: Sir Francis Beaufort, Fitzroy of 'The Beagle', Sir Roderick Murchison, Sir William Parry, Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor and Sir Wilfred Thesiger.

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