London's best-connected man

Walking through Mayfair with Hugo Campbell-Davys is an education. ‘This place,’ he says, wafting a slim hand at a nondescript building off Berkeley Square, ‘is soon to be a great little bar’; further along the street he stops to point out what’s going to become a ‘very interesting business members’ club with a restaurant’. Then there’s the ‘lovely Italian… new chef… divine pizza’, and a ‘super-cool pop-up’. Working for ES magazine, I thought I had my finger on the pulse but Campbell-Davys is the pulse. He’ll be inside the capital’s hottest new openings before the paint has even dried. Ask him where to take a first date or a prospective client and he’ll give you three options, then tell you who the manager is, where to sit and what to order. ‘It’s just what I do,’ he shrugs. ‘I like helping people.’

This social altruism, coupled with an insider knowledge of the future of London’s nightlife, is set to make the 35-year-old a lot of money. He has taken his Urbanologie email newsletter, which he started in 2012, and transformed it into an online private members’ lifestyle club and community spanning the globe. Pay your £100 annual membership, log on, and you’ll have access to reviews of new venues long before the critics go in, round-ups of the best hotels and galleries, and interesting or surprising things to do each night across London and New York, with Dubai, LA, Miami and Monaco on the horizon, pieced together by the best connected ‘Hugos’ in each city. New York went live earlier this month; LA and Miami are next. It’s a move he hopes will take Urbanologie’s turnover, through membership fees and tie-ups with luxury partners (‘no advertising’), to £3m in the next three years.

This is quite a feat for something that began as a hobby — a free newsletter put together for friends out of ‘a personal curiosity to find out more about London’. But Campbell-Davys’ friends are the kind of high-net-worth individuals luxury brands would kill to connect with. Members range from CEOs to news anchors, magazine editors and MDs of entertainment agencies. ‘It started under the radar — invite only. But membership grew and grew, mainly through word-of-mouth.’ As subscribers to the original Urbanologie newsletter swelled, Campbell-Davys sought investment from founding members including Amanda Wills, the former MD of Virgin Holidays.

Earlier this year he quit his day job in luxury brand consultancy to work full-time on the site as London editor. He hired a web developer, a web designer and two admin staff and moved into a pod in a swanky shared office in Pavilion, a members’ club on Kensington High Street. Now Urbanologie has 10,000 members, and an app is launching next year allowing them to share personalised itineraries as well as gain priority access to openings and events. His members work mainly in finance, property and tech, and are ‘cash-rich, time-poor — they want to be plugged into a city’s coolest new places but want someone to tell them quickly where’s worth going to and why’. He’s keen to point out that movers and shakers in media, fashion and travel (who might think they are suitably in the know already) are also joining.

Campbell-Davys looks less like a business mogul and more like an off-duty nightclub manager (he did this for six years before getting into PR). He’s slight, unshaven, and when we meet at the Arts Club in Dover Street — his ‘other office’ — he’s wearing jeans, smart shoes and a blue shirt unbuttoned to reveal a smattering of chest hair. There’s nothing overtly flash about him.

A typical day starts at 5am. The first thing he does is check which of his members and Facebook friends (5,000 of them) are celebrating their birthday and wish them many felicitations: ‘It’s a nice way for me to connect with people.’ He’s in the office by 7.30am, where he writes up the previous night’s reviews and news, researches new places he’s heard about through conversation and follows up with ‘potential luxury brand partners’. He’ll go to three parties or events (‘only the ones that excite me’), often not getting home until past midnight.

This champagne-fuelled Monday to Friday is balanced by not drinking at weekends and chilling out in his small flat just off the King’s Road. ‘I relax, I work, I go for long walks along the Thames. I sit in parks and read books. It’s a chance to refresh myself and do things on my own.’ He also goes to Morocco up to four times a year, to a yoga and surfing retreat. I struggle to picture him doing sun salutations on a longboard.

He is expert at talking with authority, while revealing very little about himself, so is a hard man to get to know. He’s slightly camp in the ‘dahling, fabulous’ way posh men can be. Any talk of his love life makes him squirm. ‘I’m perpetually single,’ he says, slightly flustered. ‘I never use Tinder. No, no, no. I like being on my own. My friends and contacts add colour to my life. I do know quite an extraordinary amount of people.’

Campbell-Davys has a little black book that could give Tatler’s a run for its money. But I’m interested to know how many of the contacts, names and faces that he courts so successfully, and who subsequently sign up to Urbanologie, he counts as friends. ‘I don’t differentiate between friends and acquaintances,’ he says. ‘An acquaintance is someone I don’t know quite as well as an older friend. Maybe they’re about to be my new best friend; I just haven’t spent enough time with them.’

His love of socialising and meeting new people comes, he thinks, from a childhood spent at boarding schools. He was born in Westminster, where he lived until his father Richard, a peer and entrepreneur, and mother Charlotte, a gallery owner, divorced when he was ten. He, his older sister Lydia (now living in Zimbabwe), younger sister Octavia (a polo trainer) and his twin brother Ivor (a yoga instructor in Ibiza) moved with their father to Australia, where he had ‘an idyllic time. I was very lucky.’ When he was 14 the family moved from Perth down under to Perth, Scotland (‘my father thought we’d get a better education’) and he went to three different boarding schools, the last of which was Ampleforth, a monastic school in North Yorkshire, which he says ‘was incredibly sociable. I loved it.’