The sun is shining brightly through the wall of windows in the Eight Club’s spacious rooftop lounge area, six floors above a side street that’s minutes from Moorgate. It’s a friendly and relaxed space to take in the panoramic view east across Shoreditch and west to the City skyline. The interior design is welcoming, quietly fashionable in a way that sets the tone but doesn’t shout about it, punctuated by much interesting contemporary art and stylish but comfy modern furniture. There’s nothing traditional about Eight Club, except perhaps the hospitality on offer: the professional levels of service and discretion that’s de rigueur in stuffier establishments.

The easy-going vibe is a distinctive quality shared by both private members’ clubs. ‘To me, the whole point of a members’ club is not that we define who can be a member but that we know who our members are,’ Brandon Kinsman, Eight Club founder and CEO, is saying. ‘That way we can get feedback and communicate. I think it’s great to be able to walk into a place and people know your name and what you like. It’s important when training staff for them to learn how to find out about members without being intrusive.’ And, unlike many competitor members’ clubs, application for membership is simple. ‘You don’t have to write an essay to apply, or be proposed and seconded,’ Kinsman explains.

Membership opens the door to the Moorgate club and the other in historic Change Alley, near Bank. The latter was the first, opened back in 2006, and has a cosy basement lounge and bar, six private meeting rooms, three Brunswick Championship pool tables and a cinema that’s available for both private hire and club screenings. As well as the expansive rooftop lounge, Eight Moorgate boasts two terraces that wrap round two floors and fine dining in Quartier restaurant, that’s also open to the public. 

As Kinsman observes, as a club, ‘You’re defined by your location,’ and both clubs eagerly acknowledge the need for its City- and Shoreditch-based members to have space and facilities to work and hold business meetings – ‘a home-from-home office, and there’s real-time booking via members’ apps,’ Kinsman says. Moorgate has a large number of fully serviced meeting rooms which members get to use free of charge for up to two hours a day, plus there’s a dedicated and flexible co-working area called Eight Works with access to bookable desks, meeting booths, fully equipped podcast studios, a relaxation pod and self-service communal dining area. 

Down in the basement, Core offers members a world class training environment. It’s more than just a gym: it’s a big space that includes a boxing ring and “well-being lifestyle café”, with hotel style changing rooms. Here you can achieve health and fitness goals supported by personal trainers, physiotherapists, nutritional professionals and 24-hour doctors specialising in sports injuries.

The hospitality industry is having to find ways to offset the fallout from Brexit and the pandemic. Private members’ clubs are not immune from the issues the industry has been experiencing, Kinsman says. ‘We’ve lost Fridays, but we’re finding that as members move out of London, or their offices have shut, they are increasingly using Eight as their office.’ 

And when members close their laptops, there’s more: ‘We have a poker evening, a year-long tournament, private lunches with interesting people like PFA managers, cocktail-making sessions, a cycling club,’ Kinsman says. ‘And we’ve just launched a new members’ portal to gain reciprocal entry to clubs, spas and retreats around the world.’ 

Kinsman likes the idea of a shared community. It started off ‘as a bit of an accident,’ he recalls. After initially working in advertising with ambitions to be an art director, he took up film editing and when the ’80s recession started he left for New York. ‘I stayed for a year or so and came back with the idea of setting up a bar – it sounded fun.’ Then, he confesses, ‘I saw the film Cocktail on TV and went to TGI Fridays, where it was set, and landed a job. As a large US company, they had a serious training programme which I went through and worked my way up as a trainer, opened restaurants as a trainer and went into management.’ With that experience behind him, he ended up starting a restaurant with his father (the eminent designer Rodney Kinsman) in the mid ’90s, which he ran for almost a decade.

At that point he wanted to do something different and collaborated with his property developer brother-in-law. ‘I’ve always been interested in interior design and wanted to get some experience. We worked on refurbishing a building in Cornhill, which is why we came to have a club there. I could concentrate on design and start understanding how a club could work.’ Moorgate opened in 2009 and all the interior design is the work of Kinsman, who runs the portfolio.

He also came up with the name. ‘I wanted to create something anonymous that is timeless and not stuck in a particular period. Also, my mother’s Hong Kong Chinese and of course eight is a lucky number – and represents infinity – and we have pool tables, so it makes sense.’ Next year marks Eight Club’s 20^th anniversary. ‘I’m really pleased we got to two decades,’ he says. What’s next? There’s a building in north Soho that could be promising for a new venture, maybe hotel rooms, which he says he’s thinking about. ‘We’re starting to see a new generation of members over those 20 years and hope we can offer what people want. I never take it for granted – to think people will pay for membership before entering the club and stay year after year. Let’s see where we are in 10 years’ time!’

eightclub.co.uk