It feels like a distant dream now, but back when snowflakery was happily still non-existent, I was asked to go clubbing for a living. As a diarist for the Mail on Sunday in 2008, it was effectively my job to accept invitations to ‘Boujis Tuesdays’ (a club night for trustafarians who didn’t have to be in the office at 9am on a Wednesday). Why? It was a productive source of gossip.
With Prince Harry or some other youthful member of the landed gentry falling into the gutter most nights, finding scoops at west London’s plethora of nightclubs was like shooting fish in a barrel. There were a dozen nightclubs within a one-mile radius of my office in Kensington, all spilling over with aristos, royals, celebrities and pop stars. I was told by my editor at the time never to come back before 3am unless I had a scoop, and I was only too happy to obey my orders.
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Crack Babies, secret passages and flamingos
Boujis (famous for its Crack Baby shots – a mixture of vodka, passion fruit puree, Chambord and champagne) was my favourite haunt anyway, and all my friends were regulars. Spotting celebs getting up to no good in the Boujis kitchen (which served as a VVIP area and passageway to the secret smoking zone) was a common occurrence, partly because there were not yet prying camera phones for them to worry about. The thought of what went on in those clubs in the late Noughties is so fantastical that I sometimes wonder if I imagined the whole thing.
But, reader, it was real. And the return of some of the brown-loafer brigade’s favourite haunts has prompted me to take an inventory of what was on offer in the late Noughties. There was the ski-lodge-themed Bodo’s Schloss, which had a secret exit leading straight to Harry’s home in Kensington Palace.
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Raffles on the King’s Road was where Chelsea girls wearing a Middleton-esque uniform of 40 denier opaque tights and suede boots ogled Prince William. The grungy 151 club nearby played dodgy wedding music and had a secret escape hatch for Prince Harry to avoid paparazzi. Posh pop stars such as James Blunt went to Boujis. For celebrations, the go-to joint was Richard Branson’s Kensington Roof Gardens, where innocent flamingos were harassed by revellers. (Holly Branson had a raucous engagement there in 2011 which I managed to crash, disguised by a motorbike helmet.) Then there was Mahiki, which was famous for hosting Rihanna’s birthday and for serving ‘treasure chests’, vast tanks of alcohol with 20 straws (no one knew what was in them but the hangovers were lethal).
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In Fulham, Prince William’s best friend Guy Pelly ran Public, which was in the same building as an almost identical club for Hooray Henrys called Crazy Larry’s. Another Pelly establishment, Mexican-themed nightclub Tonteria on Sloane Square, was replete with a miniature railway that delivered shots of tequila. Royal chum Charlie Gilkes ran Barts, a speakeasy at Chelsea Cloisters, in the so-called ‘10 floors of whores’ building, which was twinned with Bunga Bunga, his club/pizzeria in Battersea named after Silvio Berlusconi’s sex parties.
Bringing up the rear was an array of clubs which all served a similar clientele: Amika, Whisky Mist, Albert’s and Maggie’s. The last of these was named after Margaret Thatcher – by then a pseudo-ironic icon for young toffs – whose hectoring voice boomed all night long from speakers in the loos (I am ashamed to say I had my hen night there). Since those halcyon days, most of us have grown up – and most of those madcap pleasure palaces have closed down. The latest casualties are Raffles – which came to a sad end over Christmas – and Tonteria, which closed on New Year’s Eve.
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The return of the pleasure palaces
However, just like fashion, it seems nightlife is cyclical too; a handful of these old haunts are now creaking back into existence. While some will aim to cater for a grown-up set of enfants terribles who hit their twenties in the Noughties, others want to attract ‘next gen’ aristos. In all cases, they’ve adopted slightly different names or moved to new locations. They will have to hope to recapture some of the old magic despite the fact that royals and celebrities – formerly a big draw for paying punters – rarely go clubbing any more. The resurgence of the ‘roaring late Noughties’ can be viewed as a reaction to 10 years of Mayfair’s exclusive members’ club scene.
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Young folk, and some fortysomethings like me, are bored of the formality at Annabel’s and 5 Hertford Street. They feel nostalgic for a casual local boogie in a good old-fashioned King’s Road club.
‘I’m finding that there’s a lot of incredible people that live in Knightsbridge, South Ken, Chelsea who are tired of having to commute to Mayfair and Park Lane for a good night out,’ says Marc Burton, who ran Tonteria with Pelly and is reopening 151 as ‘Rex Rooms’.
‘These people still want to go out, but there’s just no longer the choice that there was 10 years ago. We want to bring that Mayfair, Park Lane world-class quality to the local neighbourhood without the 30-minute journey in a cab.’ Carlo Carello, 38, started the renaissance in 2023 by opening B London on the old site of Albert’s club in South Kensington.
Confusingly, it’s not known as a reboot of Albert’s, and is instead supposed to be ‘Boujis 2.0’. I see it as two old favourites for the price of one. ‘The scene slowed down because the people who were the life and soul of the roaring 2000s got married and had kids,’ Carello tells me. ‘But those 40-year-olds do still go clubbing – it’s just that they go out less frequently. When they go out, they go out hard. London needs new and refreshing concepts to make it worth the visit and revive those memories.’
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When I went to the B London launch party in 2023, I was nine months pregnant with my third child. I waddled about a bit on the dance floor with Lord Freddie Windsor and his wife Sophie Winkleman and drank alcohol-free Crack Babies.
Oldies like me raced off to relieve our respective babysitters at midnight, and the 20-year-olds stayed until 3am. Oh, how things have changed. When I speak to him in early 2025, Carello is about to open Gallery, a club on the site of the old Bodo’s Schloss. But there’s a crucial ingredient missing: his royal neighbour at Kensington Palace. With Prince Harry living the quiet life 5,500 miles away in Montecito, that old secret passageway seems redundant. ‘Clubbing was celebrity-fuelled in the past,’ reflects Carello, ‘but now they want more privacy and to have house parties away from prying cameras.
If clubbers can’t catch sight of a celebrity, we have to make up for it with much more variation inside to keep them entertained. Gallery (which opened in March) has four different rooms and experiences, including a naughty boudoir and a hidden pizzeria. People don’t want to be in a sweaty box for five hours any more – we have to think outside the box, literally.’ ‘Before, nightclubs would be put together on £150,000, but I’ve spent multiple millions on Rex Rooms,’ says Burton. ‘You have to have incredibly high standards in this era. Sticky floors and a black box with a sound system and some moving lights is not enough.’
No wonder, then, that Roof Gardens (it dropped the ‘Kensington’ but retained the stunning rooftop location) has shelled out for a £40 million facelift funded by Stephen Fitzpatrick, founder of Ovo Energy. Membership is now £1,000 per year and its clientele is strictly millionaire millennials. Conveniently, it is two floors above my desk at work, so I nip up there as often as I can. Roof Gardens was once a place where you were guaranteed to find Princess Beatrice (then in her early twenties) looking for a boy to kiss in the ugly ‘moo-moo’ VIP room with its vulgar cowhide sofas.
Now, an array of elegant lounge bars and restaurants are delicately peppered with boucle sofas. Beatrice has returned and is a regular once again, albeit as a married mother of two. To cater for women like her, it offers yoga classes by day and comedy gigs by night, as well as singles ‘mixers’ for wealthy divorcees.
The dance floor still exists, but it shuts at 11:30pm. ‘We had our era, which was incredible,’ says Burton, who adds that the new wave of Kensington clubs have been designed with adults in mind. Rex Rooms has ‘got the great elements that we had at Mahiki and Tonteria, but then we’ve got a private room which is very grown-up; the music levels are much lower.
If you are in your forties you can go there and you can hear your friends speaking, but you can also dance.’ So, these days clubbing means alcohol-free Crack Babies, no laborious star-spotting, a few minutes of gentle dad-dancing and a 10-minute cab ride home in time for bed by midnight? Viva la revolución!
This article first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 95. Click here to subscribe
