Northern delights... fabled Groucho Club heads for Yorkshire’s ‘Rhubarb Triangle’
A RENOWNED London haunt of celebrities fabled for its tales of excess and louche behaviour, the Groucho Club is to expand to an unlikely sounding location – in the countryside near Wakefield.
It is due to open its first permanent outpost outside the capital at Bretton Hall, a Grade II-listed former art college in West Yorkshire, in 2026, it was announced yesterday.
Word of a new Groucho in the so-called ‘Rhubarb Triangle’, an area of famous for producing early forced rhubarb, left some wags wondering on social media if April Fool’s Day had come early. But Ewan Venters, chief executive of Groucho owners Artfarm, said the move to the North makes more sense than the Cotswolds, where private members’ club Soho House opened Soho Farmhouse in 2015.
The Costwolds ‘doesn’t represent our membership’, he told The Guardian.
He anticipates the new outpost’s core membership will be drawn from the creative communities in Leeds – where Channel 4 opened its new headquarters in 2021 – with others travelling from Manchester, around an hour’s drive away. Originally founded by a group of mostly women publishers as a Soho home for people in the arts and media, private members’ club the Groucho has boasted Oasis rocker Noel Gallagher, Kate Moss and Lily Allen among its clientele since it opened in Dean Street in 1985.
In the 1990s it was a favourite of the ‘Cool Britannia’ set, and shark-pickling artist Damien Hirst put his £20,000 Turner Prize winnings behind the bar.
The club’s name derives from the Groucho Marx quip: ‘I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.’