15 Garrick Street, Covent Garden, a Tuesday afternoon in May 2024. The membership has gathered to vote on whether to admit women for the first time in the club's 193-year history. The result: 562 in favour, 375 against. Judi Dench and Siân Phillips become the first female members later that year. The Garrick, founded in 1831 for actors, lawyers and the writing trades, has crossed the line the rest of the traditional London circuit will now be required to cross.
The vote did not come from nowhere. The Guardian published an extended membership list on 18 March 2024; among the names were the head of MI6 and the King. Several sitting Supreme Court justices were also on the list. The reputational pressure that followed produced the ballot within weeks. The legal path, when the moment came, was prepared by Lord Pannick — his opinion established that the existing rules' use of "he" could be construed to mean "she". The membership voted to accept the opinion. The doors opened.
The structural significance is the cascade. White's, the oldest of all, retains the single-gender rule. So do Boodle's, Brooks's, the Beefsteak, the Savile, Buck's. The combined membership runs into the thousands; the combined median age, at most of these institutions, runs into the seventies. The Garrick vote has, by force of precedent, made the legal and reputational position of the remaining single-gender clubs considerably harder to hold.
What the modern Mayfair circuit has already demonstrated is that room dynamics do not depend on gender. Loulou's at 5 Hertford Street, the Living Room at the Twenty Two, Casa Cipriani — all are mixed, all are functioning at discretion levels the older clubs were once thought to have a monopoly on. The Garrick will be, over the next five years, the first test of whether tradition and admission can be reconciled. The rest of the circuit will follow, on their own clocks. The question of what the London club becomes in the second half of the decade is, for the first time in two centuries, genuinely open.
— Camille
