The Reform Club & Pall Mall Clubland
Why is it significant?
Stop outside the stately grey palazzo at number 104, which looks as if it had been lifted out of Renaissance Rome and set down on Pall Mall. That is no accident: Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament, modelled it on the Palazzo Farnese. This is the Reform Club.
Key Facts
| Place | The Reform Club & Pall Mall Clubland |
|---|---|
| Address | Reform Club, 104 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5EW, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.50620, -0.13300 |
| Part of Walk | Crowns, Pelicans and Bearskins: Royal London from The Mall to St James's |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop outside the stately grey palazzo at number 104, which looks as if it had been lifted out of Renaissance Rome and set down on Pall Mall. That is no accident: Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament, modelled it on the Palazzo Farnese. This is the Reform Club.
Inside these walls, on the 2nd of October 1872, a very precise English gentleman called Phileas Fogg bet his fellow members twenty thousand pounds that he could travel around the world in eighty days... and come back to this very room. He is fictional, of course, the hero of Jules Verne's novel of 1873. But real people raced his ghost: in 1889 the American journalist Nellie Bly did the trip in seventy-two days.
The club itself was founded in 1836 by supporters of the Great Reform Act, which had shaken up a corrupt voting system. Its kitchen was famous too. The chef Alexis Soyer designed it with gas ovens and clever gadgets, and he went on to set up soup kitchens during the Irish famine.
Look along the street. Pall Mall is the heart of clubland. Next door is the Travellers Club, which once required its members to have travelled at least five hundred miles from London. On the corner, the Athenaeum, with a gilded Athena over its door, where bishops, scientists and writers have dined for two centuries. And in 1807, Pall Mall became the first street in the world to be lit by gas, in a demonstration that drew astonished crowds.
Walk a few steps east to Waterloo Place and look south: there is the Duke of York on his column, where you began. In one short loop you have walked through five centuries of the British monarchy: Henry the Eighth's palace, Charles the Second's park and pelicans, Victoria's balcony, and a living King in a cream house on the Mall. Kings and queens have come and gone, but the stage set is still here... and every June, the whole show begins again.