Club House

According to Dan Cruickshank’s “Soho: A Street Guide to Soho’s History, Architecture and People”, 48 Greek Street is considered “one of Soho’s finest Georgian houses”, built in 1741-42 and possessing “more than usual grandeur” - with its stone architraves, pulvinated friezes and cornices and fine Rococo ceilings, more expectable of the Palladian mansions of St James’s. The building is also noted for its large staircase with its “majestic flights of beautifully turned balustres and Doric newels ascending around an open well”.

It has been at the heart of the Victorian art scene and associated with many prominent figures, including the Earl of Carlisle, the Earl of Crawford, artists: James Mathews Leigh (1808-1860), the founder of the Heatherley School of Fine Art, Henry Le Jeune (1819-1904), Scipio Clint (1805–1839), Francis Arundale (1807-1853) and Mary Ann Arundale (1811-1904); musicians & composers: Vincent Novello (1781-1861), Christopher Edwin Cumming Willing (1830–1904), Sir Isaac Pitman (1813-1897), Augustus Tamplin, William Thomas Best (1826-1897), George Lindley, Lewis William Vincent Wallace (1812-1865), Henry Lavenu (1818-1859, Franz Liszt’s promoter). It was also rumoured to have been visited on different occasions by Florence Nightingale, Charles Dickens and the Hawaiian Queen Kapiolani.