The verdict The Ned is the most spectacular building in the London cohort and the most operationally ambitious; Ned's Club delivers an extraordinary setting but pays for its scale in service intimacy and exclusivity.
The verdict first: The Ned is the most architecturally spectacular setting in our London cohort and, simultaneously, the clearest demonstration of what scale costs a members’ club. Ned’s Club — the members’ operation layered above nine public restaurants and 250-plus hotel rooms inside Edwin Lutyens’ 1924 Midland Bank — delivers a setting almost no rival can touch and an intimacy that the same scale actively undermines. We assessed it across an evening as a member’s guest, taking in the rooftop, the members’ floors and the vault bar. The score reflects a genuine split decision.
The principals: a banking cathedral
The building is the headline and it deserves to be. Completed in 1924 to Lutyens’ design, the former Midland Bank headquarters at 27 Poultry was converted by Soho House and Sydell Group and opened in 2017. The vast ground-floor banking hall — verde antico columns, a coffered ceiling, multiple restaurants operating under one roof — is one of the great interior spaces in commercial London. The strongroom, now a cocktail bar lined with some 3,800 safety deposit boxes behind a multi-tonne circular vault door, is a genuinely unrepeatable room.
Ned’s Club proper sits above this on the members’ floors and the rooftop. The substance is strong but complicated: the single best spaces (the hall, the vault) are not exclusive to members, while the members-only floors, though good, do not quite match them. The club’s substance is therefore partly borrowed from a building it shares with the paying public — a real distinction from the wholly private townhouses of Mayfair.
Execution: broad and competent, rarely exceptional
With nine restaurants under one roof, the operation is enormous, and execution is consistent rather than peak. The food across the members’ floors and the rooftop was competent, well-sourced and reliably delivered — exactly what one expects of a well-run Soho House group kitchen, and no more. This is not a building where you come for a singular culinary statement; it is a building where you come for the room, and eat well enough while you are in it. Execution scores solidly but is the clearest evidence of scale’s flattening effect.
Service: the cost of volume
This is where The Ned pays for its ambition. The service was friendly and capable, but the sheer throughput of the building — members, hotel guests, restaurant covers, event traffic all moving through shared spaces — means the service cannot achieve the disappearing intimacy of a small club. The floor is managing crowds, not cosseting individuals. For a member’s guest the welcome was warm but processed; we were a party among hundreds.
This is not a failure of the staff, who were good. It is a structural ceiling. A club of this scale cannot deliver Hertford Street’s service register, and Ned’s Club does not pretend to.
Setting and tempo
The setting is, on raw spectacle, the highest in the cohort — the rooftop with its City and St Paul’s views, the banking hall, the vault. The tempo is relentless and broad: all-day, every-day, with the building rarely quiet. For some members this energy is exactly the appeal; the City wants a club that hums. For others, the absence of a calm, private register is a genuine loss. We score the setting very highly and note the tempo as a polarising feature rather than a flaw.
Membership criteria and admission
Ned’s Club operates a separate membership from Soho House, oriented toward the City of London’s professional class — finance, law, business — which suits its location opposite the Bank of England. Admission is committee-reviewed, but the scale of the building and the breadth of its membership mean the door is less of a velvet rope than at the small Mayfair townhouses; this is a club designed to serve a large working population rather than to keep numbers deliberately tiny. The membership tiers and the relationship to the broader group give members access to a substantial estate, which is part of the appeal for those who value reach. For a prospective member, the honest framing is that Ned’s Club offers a magnificent landmark and a broad professional community rather than rarefied exclusivity — and for the City professional who wants a grand, useful base near the office, that trade is entirely reasonable.
Operating tempo and daily use
The tempo is relentless and broad: Ned’s Club is a genuinely all-day, all-week operation, busy from breakfast meetings through to late drinks in the vault bar. The rooftop, the members’ floors and the shared ground-floor restaurants give the building multiple registers across the day, and the City location means weekday daytime use is heavy. This breadth is a real strength for working members, but it is also the source of the intimacy deficit — a building this busy cannot offer quiet. The contrast with a Hertford Street, where the whole point is an unobserved calm, is total: Ned’s Club is energy and scale, not sanctuary, and members should choose it for exactly those qualities rather than in spite of them.
Membership economics
Ned’s Club is a separate membership from Soho House within the same group ownership. We decline to publish a specific current fee we cannot reliably source. On value, the proposition is unusually broad — a member is buying access to a landmark with hotel, spa, multiple restaurants and a rooftop, used across the whole day — which makes the everyday-utility case strong even as the exclusivity case is weak. You are paying for breadth, not rarity.
Scoring against The Premium Standard
| Dimension | Weight | Score (/20) | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Substance (principal rooms) | 30% | 16.0 | 4.80 |
| Execution | 25% | 15.5 | 3.88 |
| Service | 20% | 14.5 | 2.90 |
| Setting | 15% | 19.0 | 2.85 |
| Value / membership economics | 10% | 15.7 | 1.57 |
Weighted total: 16.0 / 20.
The Ned is the right club for a member who wants a landmark to use, not a sanctuary to hide in. Its setting is unanswerable and its building is one of London’s great rooms. But the things a private club is supposed to protect — intimacy, low recognition, service that knows you — are precisely the things scale erodes, and Ned’s Club has chosen scale. The score is the honest sum of a magnificent room and a diluted membership experience.
The Premium Standard: 16.0 / 20
Verification
Every factual claim in this review was checked against external sources before publication, on 2026-04-07. Where a figure could not be independently confirmed, it is described in approximate terms in the text. To challenge a fact, write to corrections@premiumtravelreview.com.
Frequently asked questions
- What building is The Ned in?
- It occupies the former Midland Bank headquarters at 27 Poultry in the City of London, designed by Edwin 'Ned' Lutyens and completed in 1924. The club takes its name from the architect's nickname.
- Who operates The Ned?
- The Ned was developed by Soho House and Andrew Zobler's Sydell Group, opening in spring 2017. Ned's Club is the members' club within it, operated independently of Soho House membership.
- What is the vault bar?
- The bank's original strongroom now houses a cocktail bar lined with around 3,800 safety deposit boxes, accessed through the original multi-tonne circular vault door.
- Is Ned's Club the same as Soho House membership?
- No. Ned's Club is a separate membership from Soho House, though both fall under the broader group's ownership.
