page_title: Alfred Waterhouse
section_title: National Liberal Club
hierarchical_section_title: Alfred Waterhouse / London practice (1865–1902) / National Liberal Club
caption_attribution_description: English: National Liberal Club, Whitehall Place, London. Also home of the Savage Club.
context_page_description: Alfred Waterhouse RA PPRIBA was an English architect, particularly associated with the Victorian Gothic Revival architecture, although he designed using other architectural styles as well. He is perhaps best known for his design for Manchester Town Hall and the Natural History Museum in London, although he also built a wide variety of other buildings throughout the country. Besides his most famous public buildings he designed other town halls, the Manchester Assize buildings—bombed in World War II, and the adjacent Strangeways Prison. He also designed several hospitals, the most architecturally interesting being the Royal Infirmary Liverpool and University College Hospital London. He was particularly active in designing buildings for universities, including both Oxford and Cambridge but also what became Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds universities. He designed many country houses, the most important being Eaton Hall in Cheshire, largely demolished in 1961-63. He designed several bank buildings and offices for insurance companies, most notably the Prudential Assurance Company. Although not a major church designer he produced several notable churches and chapels.
context_section_description: One of the Waterhouse's significant public buildings in London is the National Liberal Club (1884–87) a Gentlemen's club, it is a study in Renaissance composition. He himself belonged to the Liberal Party and his brother Theodore was solicitor to the club. It was built on a key site overlooking Whitehall Gardens and Victoria Embankment. The budget was a generous £200,000 (about £23,000,000 in 2019) of which £169,950 was spent on the building. The club members had decided they wanted the building in an Italian Classic style. The Builder magazine trying to describe in issue xlvii of 1885 the style of the building had this to say:
  Its style could not be described in a word....the Liberal party is a heterogeneous jumble of discordant elements, and....in scattering varied inconsequential details over his work Mr Waterhouse has exactly hit off the idiosyncrasies of his clients
  The site was on an awkward corner, being trapezoidal in shape. The design had to incorporate both several large rooms and the largest number of members' bedrooms in any London Club, well over a hundred. The building is clad in Portland Stone at the insistence of the Crown Estate, owners of the land. The entrance hall leads to the main staircase, elliptical in plan, originally it was based on the Bramante Staircase in the Vatican, but damaged by bombing in World War II it was rebuilt as a cantilevered stair, though the marble balustrade is close to the original. The main staircase is at the centre of the building and the other rooms are designed around it. The lower flight leads down to the original double height Smoking Room that is entered from the basement, where the extensive wine cellars were. The Smoking Room has faience covered walls, Ionic columns and ceiling, easy to clean nicotine stains off, the ceilings in the rest of the building are plaster. The rest of the entrance level known as the lower ground floor is taken up with a reception lobby, cloak rooms, billiard room and other ancillary spaces. The next floor up, the upper ground floor, contains the Grill Room overlooking Whitehall Place, the main dining room overlooking the Embankment, the Writing Room that overlooks Northumberland Avenue, these are all double height rooms. The terrace outside the dining room runs the full length of the building and is above the former billiards room on the lower floor, this contained six full sized billiard tables. The main staircase rise to the first floor where it ends, this floor contains more public rooms, including the Reading Room overlooking the Embankment, with the Gladstone Library next door that overlooks Northumberland Avenue, the walls are lined by two levels of book cases the upper reached from a gallery running around the room, with an iron work balustrade. There used to be 35,000 books on the shelves, these were sold to the University of Bristol in 1975 and have been replaced by fake book spines.
  The roof of the building is influenced by French Renaissance buildings such as Château de Chambord. Rising a total of seven floors including the rooms in the roof. The structure has external load-bearing stone walls, but with steelwork columns and beams internally. The steelwork was the most complex yet used in a London building, it enabled the lower floors with a series of large rooms, the dining room for instance is 110 feet long by 35 feet wide, to support the walls of the much smaller bedrooms.  The building also incorporated other advanced features, the use of electric lighting, the provision of hydraulic lifts, and sewage disposal systems, the use of dropped ceilings in the main rooms allowed space for the ventilation system, the air for which was cleansed by high pressure water jets before being circulated through the rooms. Additionally the building had a large number of bathrooms and toilets. Much decorative use is made internally of faience of varying colours to clad columns and other features. The major rooms are all lined by rows of columns along their walls, each room having a slightly different style of column and colour of faience cladd
caption: The National liberal Club, the tower houses the secondary staircase, to the left is the terrace with the billiard room beneath, to the right the lowest row of windows lights the original Smoking Room, above is the former Writing Room (now the Smoking Room), the next level is the Gladstone Library, these are double height spaces, the upper four floors are bedrooms
exif: {}