To enter the India Club on the Strand in London is to encounter an authentic version of post-colonial India. Everything is much as it was when the club – whose founding members included Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and Countess Mountbatten, wife of the last viceroy – moved in 1964 to a building where, according to anecdotes, the India League had held meetings in the 1950s, soon after independence in 1947.

The wood-laminated tables are surrounded by straight-backed club chairs and the lounge bar, with its original stools, is almost a facsimile of Delhi’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club. The restaurant walls are hung with portraits of the first British Indian MP, Dadabhai Naoroji, Mahatma Gandhi and Krishna Menon, the independence campaigner who became the first Indian high commissioner to the UK. The only sop to modernity is a new cash register.



But this piece of living history is under threat. The freeholders, Marston Properties, plan to refurbish the six-storey building, part of the Strand Continental Hotel, to create modern tourist accommodation. The owners, Yadgar Marker and his daughter Phiroza, had hoped that Historic England would protect the building with listed status, but this month the decision went against them.

“We were shocked and also very saddened,” Phiroza Marker said. “We think they failed to realise the significance of the India Club. We do feel like an injustice is being served because they were very selective about what part of history they think is important.”

Historic England rejected the application because the India Club was originally established at the other end of the Strand, at 41 Craven Street, as an offshoot of the India League, the organisation for independence activists in Britain. That building is listed, so, for the public body, history has been preserved.

“London is so homogenised now – everything looks the same,” Marker said. “What makes London special is places like the India Club – the memories are soaked into the walls. Other places try to recreate history and manufacture it. We’ve just left it as it was. If the building goes, everything the club represents will be lost for ever.”

Lady Mountbatten and Nehru, founding members of the India Club, at a reception at Kensington Palace Gardens in 1955 Photograph: ANL/Rex/Shutterstock

Official bodies that approach history in a measurable way fail to preserve places that create the atmosphere of London and offer a direct link to the past, says Will Self, the novelist, who has been a regular patron of the club since the 1980s.

“They’re falling like ninepins,” he said, mentioning restaurants such as Stockpot and Lorelei with authentic 1950s and 1960s interiors which have both closed in the last few years. “I can’t think of anything that’s left now, apart from really high-end establishments, or the fucking Garrick Club. It’s very hard to think of modest establishments.

“This is about a resource that we all share in, civic space, and it’s about civic space only being valued commercially. We see it in the pimping of Grenfell Tower leading to the deaths of social housing tenants, we see it in the parametrically designed glass bodkins that go up all over the place that really are just tents because they’ll be up for 50 years and then down again. We see this commoditisation of space all around us at the moment and it needs to be resisted.”

So far 22,000 people have signed a petition supporting the India Club, including descendants of Lady Mountbatten and Annie Besant, the founder of the Home Rule for India group. Shashi Tharoor, the Indian MP whose father Chandran helped set up the India Club, described the decision not to list the building as “deplorable”, something that “disregards both history and popular sentiment”.

William Gould, professor of Indian history at the University of Leeds, said the club played an important role in the 1960s and the first arrivals of immigrants from south Asia to help rebuild postwar Britain.

“There’s some evidence that this was a place that people came to when they first arrived,” he said. “It is related to some of the themes of Windrush.”

And the restaurant seems to have played a role in Britain’s culinary revolution, he said. “There’s evidence from the petition that the India Club was one of the places that people first tasted Indian food in the UK.”

The India Club is approaching its last stand. The proposal from Marston Properties will go to Westminster Council’s planning committee in the next few months. “It’s really up to them now,” Marker said. “We hope they recognise how important this building is, not only within Westminster but to London as a whole.”

• This article was amended on 24 May 2018 to include the year, 1964, in which the India Club moved to the building at 143-145 Strand, and to add the anecdotal evidence that the India League had met there in the 1950s.

