Salon society: highbrow nights out

When the journalists Katie Glass and Joy Lo Dico set up a pop-up members’ club, The Other Club, last autumn, with a different debate, talk or dinner each night of the week, they had no idea whether anyone would show up. ‘It was like having a party,’ says Glass, a columnist at The Sunday Times Magazine. ‘There might be this humiliation where you tell everybody you’re doing this thing and then nobody comes.’

People didn’t just show up. Tickets for almost every event — including a debate between Playboy Bunnies and a member of the No More Page 3 campaign; musicians Katie Melua and VV Brown on their experiences of the male-driven music industry; and the classicist Mary Beard on rebellion throughout the ages — sold out within a week. News of the club spread by word of mouth, on Twitter and on Facebook. For six weeks, Glass and Lo Dico virtually lived in the venue, a small room in Soho’s Kingly Court. By the end, they were exhausted. ‘It almost killed us,’ says Glass, but the experience opened her eyes to an unfilled niche in the capital’s nightlife: ‘It became apparent that people are really interested in coming to these kinds of events.’

Now, with her friend Zara Shirwan, she runs First Edition Talks, a roving social debate forum — a modern-day salon, if you will. Guest speakers discuss a subject for 20 minutes before it goes to the floor. Held at venues across the city — a current series is running at the St Martin’s Lane club, Library, while another is planned for The Hospital Club in Covent Garden — the evenings will be advertised on Twitter. Forthcoming debates will feature YBA Mat Collishaw, software developer Dan Williams and art critic David Lee on whether technology is ruining art; and writer Julie Bindel discussing whether we are ‘post-gay’ with drag collective Sink The Pink and Made In Chelsea’s Ollie Locke.

In noting this niche, Glass and Shirwan aren’t alone. Across the city, in pubs and galleries, bars and clubs, on roof terraces and in public halls, Londoners are flocking to evenings of intellectual stimulation. Like First Edition, Salon London offers nights dedicated to the discussion of ideas. ‘The concept came out of the clubbing model of the 1990s,’ says co-founder Helen Bagnall, a 43-year-old writer who runs the group with musician Juliet Russell, 47, and web architect Diccon Towns, 45, ‘that feeling that you very much enjoy going out and having unexpected experiences, but as you get older and work gets harder, you don’t want all your social life to revolve around boozing.’ What began as a gathering of 40 acquaintances in a Westbourne Grove church hall six years ago has become something bigger. There are monthly events at bookshops and bars, with three speakers at each. Recent nights have seen the technology writer Ben Hammersley discuss brain optimisation, and author Olivia Laing on the relationship between creativity and alcohol.

Offbeat literary nights are flourishing, too. At Pin Drop, founded by the writer Elizabeth Day and curator Simon Oldfield, both 35, actors such as Russell Tovey and Ed Stoppard, and authors including Lionel Shriver and Julian Barnes, read short stories aloud at galleries and other venues. Day and Oldfield, long-term friends, came up with the idea two years ago. ‘When I was a child my father would read Anne of Green Gables to me before bed,’ says Day. ‘I remember thinking how special it was and it doesn’t happen as an adult.’ They chose the short story format because it offered a ‘complete experience’. Last month, meanwhile, marked the London debut of The Moth, the American storytelling event founded in 1997 by the novelist George Dawes Green. Its two-hour ‘slams’ see members of the audience stand on stage and tell five-minute, real-life tales. The first London ‘slam’ drew a crowd of 100 to The Book Club bar in Shoreditch; monthly events, costing £8-£10, are planned from now on.

There are even clubs promising to make science hip. The website Super/Collider runs a pop-up astronomy club on the roof of its Dalston headquarters, and holds science nights at venues across East London. Events began five years ago and have included talks on the history of drinking in space by David Lane, co-editor in chief of food journal The Gourmand, and the London launch of The Space Project, a compilation album created using sounds captured by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft.

Of course, nights at which authors read book extracts are a publishing industry standard. Public lectures are nothing new, and political parties regularly host debates for members. But these grassroots gatherings offer something different. They are informal, unstuffy, accessible. Rarely do tickets cost more than £20. ‘So often book events are crap white wine in the corner of a bookshop,’ says Damian Barr. The 38-year-old writer and author of Maggie and Me founded his eponymous literary salon, where authors such as Bret Easton Ellis and David Nicholls read from their latest work while the audience sip cocktails, because he ‘wanted to go to something that was as much about drinking as about thinking.’ It has just celebrated its sixth birthday and, with an audience of around 250 a time, has moved from its original venue, Shoreditch House, to the larger Smoking Room at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel.

These events also offer a specific intimacy. Last year saw a Pin Drop audience watch Russell Tovey moved to tears while reading White Angel by Michael Cunningham. He went on stage just after the novelist Julian Barnes had read one of his own works, Complicity. ‘Everyone left feeling they’d witnessed something that they would never forget,’ says Day.

Perhaps, then, it’s no surprise that they lure a rather different crowd from your standard literary or academic soirée. Pin Drop and Barr’s salon are popular date destinations. Salon London’s crowd is mostly twenty- and thirty-something professionals — though Bagnall says she’s seen seventy-somethings there, too. Super/Collider’s 31-year-old founder, journalist Chris Hatherill, says that despite their science focus, events attract plenty of young creatives: ‘There are a lot of secret nerds — photographers, musicians — who are really into science.’ George Dawes Green describes his story slam audience as ‘the kind of crowd you’d find at a rock concert’.

Not that the new breed of salons are wanting in ‘seriousness’. The London Philosophy Club, run by Filip Matous, a 31-year-old marketing consultant, is planning an all-day event dedicated to the ancient philosophy of stoicism, at Queen Mary University in November. Speakers will include Professor Christopher Gill, Emeritus Professor of Ancient Thought at Exeter University, as well as Jules Evans, Matous’ fellow LPC organiser and author of Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, discussing how to apply stoicism to build a better life.