The Campaign to Save London’s India Club

A little deviation from China today, but an important one. The India Club on London’s Strand is an institution – not one for the super rich and wealthy, the particularly fashionable or the jet-set crowd. Rather it’s a place in the West End without pretensions that hasn’t changed much in nearly 70 years. To walk into the India Club (and anyone can) – the bar on the first floor and the restaurant on the second floor are a little whiff of the 1940s. It does quite good business despite being irredeemably old fashioned – barristers from the nearby chambers and law courts, academics and students from King’s, those who know their West End beyond the chains and the fly-by-night trendy eateries.

The Club has links to Krishna Menon (a former editor at Penguin Books and later India’s first High Commissioner to London) – Nehru and Lady Mountbatten were early members and patrons. The entire building was The Strand Continental Hotel at one point – and indeed part of the building is still a budget hotel. And so, of course, it’s under threat from developers and, of course, the developers want to rip it all out and create God only knows what horror. So there’s a campaign – see below….sign the petition, have a moan and then, if you haven’t, go and have some food and a beer and support them.