15 Garrick Street, Covent Garden, on a Tuesday afternoon in May 2024. The membership of the Garrick Club has gathered to vote, after a two-hour confidential debate, on whether to admit women for the first time in the club's 193-year history. The result, when it is read out, is 562 in favour, 375 against — a 60 per cent majority, sufficient for passage. 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 that the rest of the traditional London circuit is now structurally required to cross. The single-gender clubhouse, in 2026, has roughly five years left as a category.
The Garrick was founded by a committee that included the Duke of Sussex and named for the eighteenth-century actor David Garrick. The membership has, across two centuries, included Charles Dickens, Sir John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Benedict Cumberbatch, and a long parade of the senior judiciary — among them, until 2024, several sitting Supreme Court justices whose presence on the membership list was the proximate cause of the controversy. The Guardian published an extended membership list on 18 March 2024. Among the names were the head of MI6 and the King. The pressure for the vote followed within weeks. The legal mechanism, when the vote came, did not require a constitutional rewrite — Lord Pannick's opinion, commissioned by four members, established that the existing rules' use of 'he' could be construed to also mean 'she'. The Garrick membership voted to accept the opinion. The doors opened.
The structural significance is not the Garrick alone. It is the cascade now arriving at the other men-only clubs in London. White's, the oldest of all, founded 1693, retains the single-gender rule; Boodle's, 1762; Brooks's, 1764; The Travellers Club on Pall Mall, 1819; The Beefsteak Club, 1876; Buck's, 1919; The East India Club, 1849; the Savile Club, 1868. The combined membership runs into the thousands. The combined median age, on the membership rolls of most of these institutions, now runs well into the seventies. The Garrick vote has, by force of precedent, made the legal and reputational position of the remaining single-gender clubs much harder to defend.
The principals who have, until now, used the traditional St James's circuit as their working clubrooms — and there are still many — are watching the cascade with measured interest. The structural question is not whether the remaining clubs will admit women in the next ten years. That outcome is, on current trajectory, all but inevitable. The structural question is whether the institutions, having spent two centuries optimising for a single-gender membership, retain the room dynamics that made them worth joining in the first place. The Garrick will be, over the next five years, the first test of whether admission and identity can be reconciled.
What the modern Mayfair circuit — Birley's two clubs, Casa Cipriani, the Twenty Two — has demonstrated is that the room dynamics that the traditional clubs were preserving can, in fact, be reproduced in mixed-gender form without loss. Loulou's at 5 Hertford Street, the Living Room at the Twenty Two, the grand hall at Casa Cipriani: all are mixed, all are functional, and all are operating at a level of discretion that the older clubs were once thought to have a monopoly on. The Garrick vote was a recognition, among many other things, that the monopoly never really existed.
The traditional circuit will not disappear. The history is real, the libraries are irreplaceable, and the membership lists at White's and Boodle's will continue to include the most senior names in British public life. What changes, from 2024 onward, is that the membership at those institutions can no longer assume the structural separation that defined them. The Garrick crossed the line first. The rest of the circuit will follow, on their own clocks, and the question of what the traditional London club becomes in the second half of the 2020s is now genuinely open.
— Camille Vedy
