Athenaeum Club

The club owes its founding, in 1824, to John Wilson Croker, then Secretary of the Admiralty, who wanted a meeting place for men of letters, scientists and devotees of the fine arts. On John Nash's recommendation it commissioned Decimus Burton to design its future home; Burton was appointed architect in April 1824. The same May, the club took rented rooms at 12 Waterloo Place.

Finding a site took several attempts. The New Street Commissioners turned down Burton's plans for a plot north of Pall Mall East, because they projected beyond the building line, and the site was dropped in December 1824. In March 1825 the committee approved his preliminary plans for a clubhouse on the east side of Union Square (now Trafalgar Square), but in December 1825 the club chose instead the site of Carlton House, which was about to be demolished. The clubhouse was finally built on part of the courtyard of the demolished Carlton House, on a lease from the Crown.

On another part of the Carlton House site Nash designed the United Service Club, and the Commissioners of Woods and Forests required the two buildings to match. By an agreement of 7 December 1826 the Athenaeum undertook to adopt, for its east entrance front, the design of the United Service Club's west front, with three modifications. Burton redrew his plans, which the Commissioners approved on 9 February 1827.

The building work was delayed by difficulties in taking possession of the site: two sitting tenants had to be bought out for £1,500. The builders were Joseph Bennett and James Hunt, of Horseferry Road, who bid £26,715. In July 1828 the club asked for permission to add a frieze reproducing that of the Parthenon, and John Henning junior contracted to carve it in Bath stone for £1,300. Members first occupied the clubhouse on 8 February 1830, and Edward Hodges Baily's statue of Athena was erected that year. The total cost, furniture and architect's commission included, came to £43,101. The outlay left a shortfall of around £20,000, which 200 extra members, elected in 1830, were meant to make good.

Burton remained the club's architect until 1864. A gallery was put up in the library in 1831, and another, with a spiral staircase, in the south library in 1856. The building was lit by gas: by 1838 the club was short of money again after costly repairs to the damage done by the gas lighting; in 1843 an improved gas-lighting system invented by Michael Faraday was fitted in the library; and in 1886 the club changed over to electricity. In 1891-92 Edward Poynter and Lawrence Alma-Tadema were invited to redo the interior decoration. In 1899 T. E. Collcutt designed a recessed attic storey, later converted to house members. The building was listed at Grade I on 5 February 1970.

The building is stucco-faced and its roof is hidden. Its highly accomplished Graeco-Roman design balances Nash's former United Service Club. It has two principal storeys, the unobtrusive set-back attic storey and a basement; the entrance front, on Waterloo Place, is seven windows wide, and the elevations to Pall Mall and the garden are five windows wide.

The smooth rusticated ground floor carries at its centre a tetrastyle Roman Doric portico with coupled columns. Alternate triglyphs of the Doric entablature serve as brackets for the first-floor balcony, whose cast-iron railing with Grecian balusters stops at each corner on a pedestal bearing a tripod lamp. Above the portico, the stone balustrade, solid at the centre, supports the gilded statue of Athena carved by Edward Hodges Baily. The Panathenaic frieze, John Henning junior's version carved in Bath stone and later painted in the Wedgwood manner, crowns the piano nobile.

Inside, the entrance hall is basilican: colonnades of three bays with Tower of the Winds capitals divide it into a nave and aisles, and the nave is tunnel-vaulted; Alma-Tadema redecorated the hall. The grand staircase rises from the hall in a single flight, splits in two and returns to the first-floor landing over the hall's vault, beneath an octagonal lantern for which Alma-Tadema designed a hanging lamp. On the wall of the intermediate landing, a pseudo-portico still held, when the building was listed in 1970, a gilded plaster cast of the Apollo Belvedere, Burton's gift to the club, which the committee had decided to keep at the end of February 1830.

When the building was listed in 1970, the Morning Room and the Coffee Room were in the Grecian style. Upstairs, a great tripartite drawing room is divided into three compartments by Corinthian columns. Burton designed some of the club's original mahogany furniture, which is still used.

The building is the home of the Athenaeum. The club's rules allow up to 2,000 members, who come to read, to research, to hear talks, or to see friends over lunch or dinner.

The library, with about 70,000 volumes, is spread through several rooms: the South Library, its West and North satellites, and the Drawing Room. The Coffee Room is the main dining room and the Morning Room the main bar; the club also has bedrooms and a restored smoking room on the upper floor, where smoking is no longer permitted.

A private club: the building is seen from the street, at 107 Pall Mall on the corner of Waterloo Place, where the gilded Athena stands on the balcony above the columned entrance.