Qualla: National Liberal Club

National Liberal Club: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jwslubbock, CC BY-SA 4.0. When the National Liberal Club's building opened in 1887, William Ewart Gladstone himself attended as one of the founders — he had established the club in 1882. He chose the colour of the walls — a deep red — and would later inaugurate a Political and Economic Circle that still meets at the club in the 2020s. The architect was Alfred Waterhouse, who had already given the country the Natural History Museum and a great deal else, and who now produced for the Liberal Party a clubhouse so vast it could accommodate six thousand members. At its opening, no club building in London matched it for sheer scale; only the Royal Automobile Club, finished in 1910, would surpass it. The address remains 1 Whitehall Place, looking out across the Victoria Embankment toward the Thames.

Read more: National Liberal Club on Qualla

Image: Jwslubbock | CC BY-SA 4.0

National Liberal Club: Waterhouse's Renaissance Pile

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fred Romero from Paris, France, CC BY 2.0. The clubhouse cost about £165,950 to build — a substantial figure in the early 1880s — and Waterhouse blended French, Gothic, and Italianate elements into a Renaissance Revival composition heavy with Burmantofts Pottery tilework manufactured in Leeds by Wilcox and Co. The members...

Read more: National Liberal Club on Qualla

Image: Fred Romero from Paris, France | CC BY 2.0

National Liberal Club: A Membership of Writers, Lloyd George, and Cyril Smith

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jwslubbock, CC BY-SA 4.0. Through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Club resided just slightly off-axis to the political mainstream — close enough to power to matter, far enough from it to attract eccentrics. David Lloyd George lived at the Club in the 1890s, when he was a young Liberal MP r...

Read more: National Liberal Club on Qualla

Image: Jwslubbock | CC BY-SA 4.0

National Liberal Club: Selling the Top Floors

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jwslubbock, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the 1980s the Club had a problem the founders never envisaged: too much building. The Liberal Party had decamped to the upper floors as its national headquarters between 1977 and 1988, but the Club itself struggled to fill 140 bedrooms across six floors. In 1985 it began a two...

Read more: National Liberal Club on Qualla

Image: Jwslubbock | CC BY-SA 4.0

National Liberal Club: Women, Eventually

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Orpen, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Club had, from the start, allowed women in as visitors but barred them from membership. In 1967, a referendum approved a category of "Lady Associate Member," initially restricted to the wives and widows of male members, at a lower fee that bought lower privileges. The first f...

Read more: National Liberal Club on Qualla

Image: William Orpen | CC BY-SA 4.0

National Liberal Club: The Liberal Tradition, Still Meeting

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Keith Edkins, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2002 Jeremy Paxman interviewed Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy in the Smoking Room for Newsnight, and pressed him about his drinking — the first time a major television interviewer had raised the topic. In 2007 Nick Clegg launched his leadership campaign from the Club'...

Read more: National Liberal Club on Qualla

Image: Keith Edkins | CC BY-SA 4.0