National Liberal Club
| National Liberal Club | |
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View of the club from the Thames Embankment
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| Alternative names | NLC The National Liberal |
| General information | |
| Status | Private members' club |
| Architectural style | French Renaissance |
| Address | 1 Whitehall Place, London |
| Coordinates | 51°30′22″N 0°07′26″W / 51.506177°N 0.123876°W |
| Groundbreaking | 1884 |
| Completed | 1887 |
| Opened | 1887 |
| Design and construction | |
| Architect | Alfred Waterhouse |
| Website | |
| www |
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The National Liberal Club, also known as NLC, is a London gentlemen's club (membership is open to both men and women). Established by William Ewart Gladstone in 1882 to provide club facilities for Liberal Party campaigners among the newly enlarged electorate following the Third Reform Act in 1884. The club's neo-Gothic building on the Embankment of the river Thames is the second-largest clubhouse ever built. Designed by Alfred Waterhouse, it was completed in 1887. Its current facilities include a dining room, a bar, function rooms, a billiards room, a smoking room, a library and an outdoor riverside terrace. It is located at Whitehall Place, close to the Houses of Parliament, the Thames Embankment and Trafalgar Square.
The genesis of the club lay with Liberal party activist (and later MP) Arthur John Williams, who proposed the creation of such a club at a Special General Meeting of the short-lived Century Club on 14 May 1882, so as to provide "a home for democracy, void of the class distinction associated with the Devonshire and Reform Clubs". The first full meeting of the new club was held on 16 November 1882, at the Westminster Palace Hotel on Victoria Street. The Century Club itself then merged into the NLC at the end of the year. In its early years, the club declared its objects to be:
An initial circular for subscribers meant that by the end of 1882, 2,500 men from over 500 towns and districts had already signed up for the new club, and membership would reach 6,500 by the time the clubhouse opened in 1887.
The club's foundation stone was laid by Gladstone on 9 November 1884, when he declared "Speaking generally, I should say there could not be a less interesting occasion than the laying of the foundation-stone of a Club in London. For, after all, what are the Clubs of London? I am afraid little else than temples of luxury and ease. This, however, is a club of a very different character", and envisioned the club as a popular institution for the mass electorate. However, another of the club's founders, G. W. E. Russell, noted "We certainly never foresaw the palatial pile of terra-cotta and glazed tiles which now bears that name. Our modest object was to provide a central meeting-place for Metropolitan and provincial Liberals, where all the comforts of life should be attainable at what are called 'popular prices'", but added "at the least, we meant our Club to be a place of "ease" to the Radical toiler. But Gladstone insisted that it was to be a workshop dedicated to strenuous labour." Funds for the clubhouse were raised by selling 40,000 shares of £5 each, in a Limited Liability Company, with the unusual stipulation that "No shareholder should have more than ten votes", so as to prevent a few wealthy men from dominating the club. However, this only raised £70,000, and so an additional £52,400 was raised for the construction of the clubhouse by the Liberal Central Association. The remaining £30,000 necessary was raised by mortgage debentures.
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