Where's the Chelsea party? The SW3 set's crisis

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2 November 2012

It’s all gone totes Pete Tong in the Royal Borough. Guy Pelly’s Public nightclub has been shut down and now there are, like, a million new options for Chelsea’s crazy club kids, but a) they’re not within walking distance and b) will any be as great as the original?

Chelsea is in crisis. Fulham is in a funk. Not that you can tell as you walk down the King’s Road by day. The usual parade of pugs, Pashleys and primped Perditas trundle up and down to the soundtrack of expensive London: the drills of basements multiplying. But come here at night, once the prams have pushed off back to Battersea, and there’s confusion in the air.

Until recently, the Hooray set knew exactly where to party: Public, Guy Pelly’s disco warehouse, formerly Crazy Larry’s. Now that it’s closed, they’re not so sure. Suddenly, half a dozen new clubs have opened, all competing for the pink-trouser pound. The Sloanehood has spread as far as Kensington and Mayfair, and the Sloanes are reeling with choice.

‘It sucks,’ opines Charlie, a 24-year-old corporate finance chuff in a cornflower-blue shirt. ‘Life after Public f***ing sucks. There’s definitely a southwest crisis.’ It’s gone 1am and we’re standing in the smoking pen of Dukebox, one of several new clubs to have opened, Medusa-like, since the closure of Public. I say new; it used to be The Valmont Club, and before that it was K Bar, where Tom Parker Bowles once taught Wills how to party. Located in a basement on a busy and grimy junction at the wrong end of the Fulham Road, it doesn’t look much from the outside, but inside the party’s pumping. A hot young crowd is grinding to a throbbing beat, while brimming shot glasses are passed around at head height.

This is the new venture from Howard Spooner, the 42-year-old business brains behind Public. He was happy to make Guy Pelly its, er, public face, not least as that helped bring in the Royals. ‘The only place where Guy was actually the operator of Public was in the press,’ sighs Spooner. Unfeasibly tall, dark and handsome, you wonder why Spooner didn’t front it himself. ‘Guy was much more current. He was a better face to push forward. But in a night at Public, did anyone really know him? He probably had a following of only about 20 people, out of 700 to 800 coming through.’ And yet, there’s no denying: they were a key 20, a magnet for hundreds more.

The story of Public’s demise, due to raucous antics in the early hours and complaints from local residents, was devoured by newspapers keen to point out the royal connection. Princes William and Harry were regular attendees, as were Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, the Middletons and all their on-off other halves. When in May Kensington and Chelsea council restricted Public’s licence to 12.30am, Pelly and Spooner closed it, and parted company to pursue their own ventures.

So are they now all chasing the Public crowd? In the dying days of Public, Pelly took an option on Kitts on Sloane Square, the sweaty little room run by Duncan Stirling and Charlie Gilkes, an Eton pal of Wills. The days when Kitts had swagger, putting on Henry Conway’s F*** Off I’m Rich night, are long gone. Gilkes and Stirling have moved on to run Barts, round the corner on Sloane Avenue, and set up two projects: Maggie’s, a Margaret Thatcher-themed club, and Bunga Bunga, a popular pizzeria where the pizzas are named after girls Silvio Berlusconi has, um, entertained.

But Pelly still wants there to be fun in Sloane Square, so he joined up with Marc Burton from Whisky Mist to create Tonteria, a Mexican hacienda-themed tequila bar. Clearly, Pelly goes in for irony when choosing names, for just as Public really wasn’t for the great unwashed, so Tonteria is no frippery (the word means ‘a thing of no consequence’ in Spanish). When I swing by, it’s a full-on building site. Pelly’s dream is to create a high-end magnet for a richer, more mature, crowd — the sort who splurge hundreds on a round on a week-night. As Spooner points out, he’ll need his customers to spend plenty to make it pay: the room only holds 150. But as if to prove how louche the crowd will be, Monday will be the bar’s signature night — this lot won’t have any bourgeois anxieties about going to work the next day. Or, as Burton puts it: ‘A lot of the top international crowd are very flexible in when they can go out. They’ve acquired a lot of money, or they’ve got very flexible jobs.’

Pelly makes no secret of the fact he’s turning his back on Fulham’s OK-yahs. Presumably, he doesn’t want them to vomit on Lord Cadogan’s new restaurant Colbert, just opened opposite. But does he miss Public? ‘Of course I miss it,’ he says. ‘It was a great business. I was very proud of what I set up. It was too successful for that area. You’ve got to move on and learn lessons. Howard is going for the Public thing, he’s nearer to Fulham, good on him. I’m not, so I don’t think we’ll cross over much.’

Spooner has unashamedly replicated the Public formula at Dukebox: a pumping sound system with kaleidoscope lights; giant sharing cocktails in the shape of eggs and presents; and sexy waitresses dressed as toy soldiers with red epaulettes and gold tassels. Even the staff are from Public — he took the lot. The one legacy he didn’t want was Pelly. Why? ‘I didn’t want him involved. One, because it’s too small to share. Two, he wanted to move on from the customer base we had. We were great friends. He hasn’t been down to the club, though.’

So where is the Public crowd now? Where are Prince Harry’s acolytes? Last week, a big chunk of them could be found literally outside Hazza’s front door, at the gates to Kensington Palace. This is the handy new location of Bodo’s Schloss, an Austrian-themed ski-lodge club in the basement of the Royal Garden Hotel. It’s the creation of Piers Adam and Nick House of Mahiki fame with two of Harry’s most loyal mates — Tom Inskip and Thomas van Straubenzee — also on board. And when they’re not kitted out in uniform check shirts, chinos and deck shoes, these chaps like to dress up. Not in Nazi uniforms any more, but dirndls and lederhosen. It’s like a sauna inside: pitch-pine walls and plenty of sweat. There are stag heads and sledges on the walls, and a DJ in a ski lift. Cocktails such as the ‘Ski Boot’ are drunk out of actual ski boots, prompting one wag to quip that, even with no ski slope, ‘you can go downhill fast’. And best of all, there’s a secret back door, so Harry can sneak in and out without the paps ever knowing via an alleged secret tunnel to the palace. Cheeky.

But while we may never see pictures of Harry at 3am again, that won’t necessarily stop bad behaviour. They may not be at Public, but they’re still at large: the jokers who allegedly pissed on cars, defecated in the street and had sex in doorways after leaving the club. Where are they now? ‘There was never any evidence of defecating or fornicating,’ corrects Spooner. ‘There was some evidence of urinating, of course, and vomiting, which was true.’

There’s nothing like that outside Dukebox tonight. Every time the conversation gets even the slightest bit noisy, we’re all told to pipe down by two bouncers. Spooner is acutely aware of Public’s negative legacy. Still, Public made a tidy profit, pulling in 2,000 people per week, and raking in profits of £1 million on an annual turnover of £5 million. So why did it all go wrong? ‘Five people being rude on the street is a lot of noise. One person being rude on the street is a lot of noise. It was a spoilt-brat element. People who thought they knew people and thought they could get away with anything. It doesn’t happen here. It was an element that came with certain people who were involved in the club before.’

So what do the punters make of Dukebox? Back to Charlie, who lives in Belsize Park. ‘Public was great because it was big, and every second person I bumped into was a friend of mine,’ he says. ‘Here, it’s good, it’s fun’ — he breaks off to make a whooping sound — ‘but this is half the size.’ The blonde next door chimes in: ‘They are letting a lot of people in who maybe weren’t at Public before. They definitely had a stricter door policy there. Everyone wanted to get in because it was the best place to be. You knew who’d be on the list were people you wanted to see.’ Charlie adds: ‘Dukebox is half the size, but it’s probably three-quarters of the fun. A lot of the people who went to Public won’t come here because it’s so small.’ So where will they go? ‘Maggie’s, but it’s too busy, or Embargo. Mahiki is too shit. It’s not even for bankers any more: it’s for bankers who don’t have a life, and gold-diggers.’

So I set off up the Fulham Road to Maggie’s, probably the world’s only nightclub inspired by a Tory leader. Inside, they’re playing the tune from Knight Rider, while the ex-PM’s speeches play on a loop in the loos. Outside, it’s public-school carnage: hordes of teenagers chain-chuffing on Camels. These are the new-gen Sloanes. Toby and Thomas have just left a major public school and they are young enough not to mind when a roaring drunk girl comes up with the familiar words: ‘Guys, guys, can I ask you for two cigarettes? I never do this. I’m so sorry, I’ve literally run out…’ What was so good about Public? ‘You knew what you were going to get when you went to Public. It was a reliable choice.’ Why do they come to Maggie’s now? ‘Not to be racist,’ says Toby, handing over the cigarettes. ‘But you get a lot more people who live in London coming here. It’s quite an English group, and that’s what clubs miss in Piccadilly. You know it’s a safe bet.’

Jake Parkinson-Smith was the man behind Boujis, the South Kensington boîte from which young Royals emerged before Public. Today, he has created 2&8, a sexy new room beneath Morton’s, a private members’ club on Berkeley Square. When Marlon Abela, the multi-millionaire owner, decided he wanted to go head-to-head with Annabel’s across the square, Jake was the man he wanted. Jake has brought in Carlo Carello, who has been in nightclubs ever since quitting Imperial College after six weeks to join Ministry of Sound as a flunky. This is a more grown-up affair, a townhouse where hedgies and media types meet for coffee by day and cocktails after hours. Being the grandson of society photographer Norman Parkinson, Jake has decked out the walls with ancestral Vogue covers from the 1950s and 1960s, featuring Jerry Hall and Jean Shrimpton in provocative poses.

It’s small — just one room — but the opening party in the Berkeley Square garden drew a thousand guests. ‘We can get 150 in here,’ says Carello. ‘It gets crazy. Everyone’s jumping on sofas.’ For Carello, the key to a good club is service. ‘It’s about making people feel special. We’ve got people spending £250 on a bottle of vodka. Jake and I make sure that if you order a bottle, it’s delivered to your table in three minutes, otherwise we’ve failed.’ And who is the crowd? ‘It’s people who have good taste: people in fashion, media, banking, socialites.’ And Sloanes? ‘Some part of the English are quite raucous. They love to drink the Jägerbomb. But we don’t want to pigeon-hole. We want an eclectic clientele. We want people to let their hair down. I don’t like a club where you can’t dance on the furniture. The problem with Public is that they pigeon-holed 100 per cent: it was very Fulham. We don’t attract a crowd who go out shouting and chanting.’

Back in Fulham, Jack Freud is putting the finishing touches to Barbarella. He’s a PR man, 32, a scion of the Freud super-achievers — Matthew Freud, head of Freuds PR company, is his uncle. This is his first club, a large, retro, low-lit basement, for a grown-up dinner then dancing: thing is, it’s bang in the middle of Fulham. ‘I am worried,’ he admits. ‘I hope that people will respect the residents. It’s something we’ve taken enormously seriously, partly because of what happened to Public.’ He’s installed sound insulation and has brought in specialist security teams. ‘I hope it’s one of those things that you prepare for but that’s never needed. But it does worry me.’

The run-up to Christmas, says Parkinson-Smith, is the best time to open a nightclub. Certainly, nowhere seems to be struggling to get the crowds in. But out on the streets of Chelsea, Sloanes still speak with awe and nostalgia of raucous nights at Public. The council isn’t granting any more licences, so there’s no chance of it coming back. The only hope is the ski season: a Public offshoot launched last winter in Verbier, and will reopen in December. Maybe Pelly could organise a charabanc shuttle service between Sloane Square and Verbier, in a magnificent gesture of defiance? Then again, is Switzerland, a nation of clock-makers and chocolatiers, ready for a busload of Fulham’s finest? Probably not. ES

CHELSEA SLANG How to talk like a toff

Bombardier the boozer of the gang Cash-lash ratio value for money Chunder being sick Chunderdragon moving your arms to replicate a dragon when chundering To cotch to get some sleep, rest Daggering a particularly chauvinist dance step (orig. Jamaica) Disrevelled how you look the morning after Floordrobe where you keep your clothes until the cleaner comes FOMO ‘fear of missing out’ Gash what used to be known as totty Hilair amusing Knee deep getting some action Lashpoint ATM OBVS obviously On the lash going out Pre-lash a few drinks at home before going out (also known as ‘prinking’ — pre-drinking) Redged reserved by ROFLcopter something very funny Safe cool Schewffy posh/public school educated Schweffing flirting Shagling checking out girls (ogling with an intention to sh*g) Totes very Vomstation a loo Vomcanos use these Yolo ‘you only live once’, excuse for making it a big one

Where's the Chelsea party? The SW3 set's crisis

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