Gresham Club

The Gresham Club was a gentlemen's club in the City of London founded in 1843 and dissolved in 1991.

It was named after Thomas Gresham and its last site was located on Abchurch Lane off King William Street.

The Club was founded in 1843 as a dining club for the professional classes of the City of London, and named after Thomas Gresham, a celebrated Elizabethan merchant who founded the Royal Exchange.

The club's first president was John Abel Smith (1802–1871), member of parliament for Chichester.

In 1853, Charles Manby Smith located the Gresham Club as a stepping-stone in a successful Londoner's sequence of increasingly elite memberships. -

...from having been wise enough to join the grocer's Plum-pudding Club, they shall end by becoming prosperous enough to join the Whittington Club, or the Gresham Club, or the Athenaeum Club, or the Travellers' Club; or the House of Commons, or the House of Lords either.

In 1879, the entrance fee was 20 guineas and the annual subscription six guineas.

Charles Dickens, Jr., reported in Dickens's Dictionary of London (1879) -

Gresham Club is composed of merchants, bankers, and other gentlemen of known respectability. No candidate is eligible until he has attained the age of twenty-one years. Election by ballot of the members, of whom 30 must actually vote. One black ball in ten shall exclude. Entrance fee, £21; subscription, £6 6s.

The newly established club commissioned a clubhouse at 1 King William Street, on the corner of St. Swithin's Lane. The architect was Henry Flower, and the beginning of construction in 1844 was marked by a dinner at the Albion Tavern, at which Sir William Magnay, Lord Mayor of London, presided.

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