London real estate doesn’t get much more prime than the glass box that tops out the Emory, the new suite-only hotel at the eastern end of Knightsbridge. The 10th-floor eyrie is divided into two spaces, their floor-to-ceiling windows offering views across Green Park to the City of London. That one of these rooms contains a swanky rooftop bar is no surprise; lofty cocktails are a no-brainer for any urban hotel developer worth their margarita salt. More striking is what lies next door.
‘Welcome to the Emory Cigar Merchants,’ says Blue Curran, the hotel’s 28-year-old head of cigars, a smoking sommelier who wears a generous beard and a slim-fitting suit. He commands a very modern space – light, airy, outward-looking. Even the central humidor, a drum of lockers with a glazed carousel of Cuban sticks, looks like it has been delivered from the future.
The Emory’s cigar lounge, which also includes classic cigar aesthetics (tan leather wingbacks, acres of burl veneer), is a modern monument to a historic pastime. For centuries, London has been a hub for cigar aficionados to buy, store and smoke their favoured sticks in lounges that have been exempt from the UK’s 2007 indoor smoking ban. In and beyond a string of new spaces like the Emory’s lounge, the cigar has evolved into a luxury product with lifestyle-driven social media accounts. They project an image that is far removed from those of the cigar-chomping archetype, and suggest a thriving contemporary demand for prized Cohibas and Montecristos. So why is a fug of fear hanging over the capital’s increasingly sophisticated cigar lounges?
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The answer lies a mile or so to the east at Westminster, where proposed legislation threatens to stub out London’s cigar culture. ‘It will be catastrophic, because it will essentially make a product illegal without making it illegal, kill off small businesses and affect the reputation of England [as a cigar centre],’ says Jemma Freeman, the chair of Hunters & Frankau (est. 1790), the UK’s exclusive distributor for Havana cigars.
The primary goal of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, which is going through the Lords, is to put out cigarettes once and for all. Starting in 2027, nobody born from 2009 onwards will be allowed to buy tobacco products; the law will effectively raise the legal smoking age by one year every year. But of more immediate concern to the cigar sector are proposals to close exemptions including more relaxed rules on plain packaging – and the anomaly of ‘sampling lounges’.
It is legal to smoke cigars indoors at a couple of dozen of these venues across the country if you are sampling a stick you’ve just bought there, in a sufficiently ventilated room. In April, Labour grandee Lord Faulkner said the exemption is ‘being exploited and abused’ while he proposed an amendment to the bill. Venues including luxury hotels with lounges were operating ‘far outside the spirit of the law’, he said.
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Freeman, who comes from a long line of cigar makers and importers, says the industry supports tightening controls on cigarettes. But she says the inclusion of cigars betrays a lack of understanding.
‘We’re talking about small, specialised businesses selling an incredibly occasionally used product,’ she says. ‘I find it hard to compare someone who’s smoking 40 cigarettes a day to someone who’s decided to celebrate his 50th birthday by having a cigar with his best friend because that’s what his dad would have done.’
She also points out that cigar smokers draw smoke into their mouths for the taste, rather than into the lungs. She adds: ‘Every piece of research that exists supports the fact that cigar smokers tend to be 35 and above. This is not a gateway product.’
Yet it is perhaps a cruel irony that the 2007 indoor smoking ban was in part responsible for modernising a would-be relic. Before then, Freeman says, most public cigar smoking took place after dinner in restaurants within certain smart postcodes. ‘That disappeared overnight and we were looking at how we could provide people with an alternative space,’ she recalls. She says the Lanesborough hotel and the Boisdale restaurants were among the first players in hospitality to offer aspirational rather than apologetic post-2007 cigar terraces. Some of the Lanesborough’s biggest spenders smoked cigars. ‘They thought if they didn’t provide them with a place to enjoy cigars, they might go elsewhere,’ Freeman says.
Meanwhile, the exemption for ‘specialist tobacconists’ to allow customers to sample cigars has evolved. These lounges still include addresses on St James’s Street, aka ‘Cigar Mile’, where, for example, James J Fox has a busy upstairs lounge. But members’ clubs and hotels soon realised they could embrace the same exemption to compete for big spenders with ever plusher indoor spaces, where premium drinks could also be sold alongside cigars that range in price from £45 to £1,500 per stick at the Emory.
Curran says the Arts Club in Mayfair, just across Piccadilly from St James’s Street, helped raise the bar with Oscuro, which opened in 2019. It had a fresh Cuban floral theme that eschewed the dark-wood fustiness typically associated with cigar smoking. Sophisticated ventilation systems keep the smoke from collecting.
Other aspirational lounges include Birley Cigars, the lounge at 5 Hertford Street. More recently, the Peninsula Hotel on Hyde Park Corner opened a rooftop cigar lounge in 2023. There’s another newish cigar space at Upstairs at Langan’s, the members’ club above the legendary brasserie, where whisky and cigar tasting events quickly sell out. The Connaught, which shares an owner with the Emory, also opened a lounge in 2023. ‘There are so many beautiful places now,’ says Curran, who got his first job at Oscuro, retraining there after years working as a Michelin-level wine sommelier.
Created to fulfil demand prompted by a change in the law, these spaces have steadily fuelled and followed an image shift. Social media has played a part in the move of cigars away from old-fashioned, fusty and perhaps a little corny into something more obviously refined, aspirational and perhaps even cool. New brands on the scene such as Swiss firm EGM, which was founded in 2017 by then 31-year-old entrepreneur Ettore Gabriele Moraschinelli, have gone viral on TikTok with videos of parties in Havana and bikini-clad women smoking coronas on beaches.
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Meanwhile, London’s cigar lounges, particularly those in luxury hotels, benefited from booming demand for cigars in Asia and the Middle East. (Cuba’s top cigar maker, Habanos, which is still 50 per cent state-owned, announced record sales of $827 million in 2024, largely as a result of Asian demand.) Collectors increasingly hold sway as the value of cigars soars. At the glitzy Habanos World Days Gala Dinner at the V&A last summer, five lots that sold for more than £4 million included 550 vintage Trinidad Fundadores cigars. A footballer’s agent bought them for £2 million, or almost £4,000 per stick.
‘I think social media has also made people more interested in the specifics of what they’re smoking,’ says George Frakes, 35, a musician and the director of 1573 Cigars, an importer. If cigar smoking used to be a habit, it’s now a game for connoisseurs obsessed with provenance as much as mouthfeel or the lifestyle.
‘It’s the same with drinking,’ Curran adds. ‘People are drinking less but they’re also drinking higher-quality products.’
Frakes says some of the most coveted cigars are now being imported from Nicaragua or Honduras from boutiques such as Nicaragua’s Foundation Cigar Co. He is also part of a modern twist in cigar style as a contemporary gentleman’s pursuit defined by experts and influencers such as Kirby Allison, an American whose aesthete’s empire is devoted to tailoring, shoes and cigar paraphernalia. If it can all look slightly pretentious to the outsider, the nostalgic clinging to a lost age evidently sells. ‘I think it’s part of that idea of spending more on quality, and a cigar completes the look,’ Curran says.
Like Freeman, Frakes is worried cigars may be consigned to history in a more literal sense. ‘The removal of a community that isn’t actually aligned with the main focus of the bill would be a very scary thing,’ he says. There is widespread anxiety in the cigar market not to appear to be buoyant at a time when visibility might be unhealthy (several big players were too wary to talk to me while the bill is still going through the Lords).
While the cigar has evolved as more of a luxury, specialist product, Freeman is at pains to point out that overall consumption is falling. ‘The entire volume of the UK handmade market is around two and a half million sticks a year, which is minuscule,’ she says, recalling that 25 years ago it was almost three times that number. (In a statement, a Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson declined to address questions about the cigar business community, saying only that ‘all tobacco products pose significant health risks’.)
Curran appears to be less concerned, and even reports rumblings of a new rash of high-end openings in the capital. Unless he hears otherwise as the Lords continue to discuss the merits of the bill, he will dispense prized cigars inside the Emory’s rooftop glass box. ‘We’re in a bit of a thumbs-down period at the moment,’ he says, referring to the bill. ‘But people still want a relaxing environment to go and enjoy themselves.’
This article first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 96. Click here to subscribe
