Friday night in the north of England. On the ninth floor of the old Granada Studios, a very chi-chi crowd is drinking tequila and eating crisps. Not Walkers out of the bag, mind, but canapes of individual crisps with creme fraiche and generous dollops of caviar. A young woman – leather shorts, chunky boots, neon lime nails, artfully messy bob – winks at me from the other side of the silver tray. “Ooh, caviar. Very posh for Manchester.”
Soho House’s 48th members’ club has caused quite the stir. Thirty years after Nick Jones opened the first club in Soho, London, the first north of England outpost of the empire is raising eyebrows. An exclusive club, in the city that AJP Taylor described as “the only place in England which escapes our characteristic vice of snobbery”. (The home, after all, of the Guardian.) An open-air rooftop pool, in the climate that fostered the textile industry because the rain created the perfect cool, damp conditions for spinning cotton. Will it work?
A 2,500-strong waitlist – the highest of any Soho House worldwide – suggests it just might. Rewind a few hours before the party, and I am with the boss, Andrew Carnie, CEO of Soho House. The space is teeming with workers in hi-vis jackets and cleaners wielding mops, and Primal Scream’s rider (bottles of spirits, along with jars of chamomile teabags) is still being installed in a makeshift dressing room, but Carnie is convinced the timing is perfect. Born 30 miles away in Preston, he has seen Manchester “change dramatically, and flourish dramatically. It has physically expanded, and extended its worldview. Hospitality has boomed, the creative industries have grown, the universities are thriving and it seems like a lot of folks who go to universities stay, which is great in the city.” Tomorrow, a second opening night will see Loyle Carner perform; in February, when the Brit awards moves from London to the city’s Co-op Live Arena, Soho House Manchester will host the afterparty. “I think this is going to be one of our most successful houses,” says Carnie.
Whether or not you have ever been inside a Soho House, it has infiltrated your culture. Perhaps you watched Carrie and Samantha sneak into the rooftop pool of the New York club, in Sex and the City. You might remember that Harry and Meghan had their first date in one of the London houses. Maybe you have heard the rumour that, when the first LA house opened, Kim Kardashian’s application was turned down. (I did ask; Soho House does not comment on members.) But the man at the top of the business, who took over from Nick Jones when the founder stepped aside in 2022 after treatment for prostate cancer that he said “changed my perspective and focus”, is a friendly and approachable 51-year-old, tattoo just visible at the cuff of his black Henley top, pristine white trainers, zero red-velvet-rope airs and graces. (A Guardian reader, indeed.) By contrast to the larger-than-life Jones, Carnie is understated. For example: he tells me he “likes running”, which turns out to mean that he recently completed a 155-mile, six-day ultra marathon across the Sahara and is getting ready for an ultra marathon across the Colorado mountains next year. It is, he says, “a good way of keeping fit”.
What sets Soho House apart from the four-century tradition of members clubs, that has its roots in the armchairs-and-claret enclaves of Mayfair and Piccadilly, is its self-proclaimed identity as being “for creative people”. This has been both the stardust that can make membership feel like a golden ticket – what Jones foresaw in 1995 was that, in contemporary culture, everyone likes to see themselves as “a creative” – and the ingredient that can rub people up the wrong way. (To paraphrase the critics: “telly wankers”.) The definition of creative people, says Carnie, is broad. “AI is creative. Hospitality is creative. Anyone can apply, and we have members from every industry.” The Manchester membership, he says, skews towards entrepreneurs. With fees starting at £1,200 a year – pricing is the same for every house in the world, but lower for under-27s – membership is privileged, but “we try not to be exclusive”, Carnie says. In Manchester, he will take part in a mentorship scheme that connects members with local creatives from lower socioeconomic or underrepresented backgrounds, who are invited to panels, workshops and networking in-house to grow their connections, confidence and experience.
In the late 90s, Soho House was about power breakfasts, boozy lunches and late-night carousing. All of which still happens, but Soho Houses have evolved as the way all of us live has changed. The membrane between our on-duty and off-duty lives has become more porous; 24/7 technology has erased the possibility of ever clocking off. The Soho House model – a third space that is neither work nor home, neither completely public nor entirely private – has become a space people gravitate toward.
“The shift was really accentuated coming out of Covid,” says Carnie. “People had gotten lonely. We are humans, and we like to be around other people. What we’ve found is that when companies have policies that allow working from home, lots of our members prefer to work from our clubs.” The appeal of this has, in fact, become a challenge, and the houses now “discourage” working all day, he says. “Laptops in the morning, social in the afternoon.” A “no-phones” rule has had to be modified now that most of us cannot bear to be parted from our devices: phones on tables are fine, but you can’t take photos or make calls.
Wellness is the new hedonism. Fitness is no longer just about grinding out 5k on a treadmill before getting on with your day, but a conversation topic, and an aesthetically sophisticated element of an aspirational lifestyle. “We all want to be healthier,” says Carnie. “But if you go back five or six years, that was all about cardiovascular fitness: you would run, row, whatever. But new science has come out that tells us we have to have strength. We still do run clubs, but now we have Reformer pilates studios, Hiit classes, padel courts.” Contrast chambers with saunas and cold plunge tubs are in huge demand, mirroring the explosion of interest in wild swimming, and the pop-up saunas that have appeared all over Britain in the past two years. The next growth area is longevity. At the Soho Farmhouse in Oxfordshire, a “Lazy Lab” offers IV infusion drips, 60-minute sessions in a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber and diagnostic testing to “future-proof” your health. “That’s what our members are telling us they want next,” says Carnie.
But the future, at least according to Soho House, is not as demoralisingly virtuous as that might suggest. Sticky toffee pudding remains their bestselling dessert, worldwide. (“If we ever try to take it off the menu, anywhere, it’s anarchy,” an executive chef tells me in the Manchester kitchen.) “Our members love a great dining experience,” says Carnie. “They don’t necessarily eat more healthily, but they do care more about where food comes from.” (Plant-based, he says, has “plateaued”.)
For all the talk of generation Z eschewing alcohol, drinking shows no sign of dying out. There are indicators of restraint – the Manchester dessert menu features a two-sip, 60ml mini-version of an espresso martini, for £7, if you prefer an alternative to stodge – and there is “a pocket, from 26- to 30-year-olds” who drink less, says Carnie. But the bigger trend is toward “clean” cocktails, with fewer ingredients and less sugar. The multicoloured, juice-laden, bafflingly named cocktail is old hat. “I get it, because if I go to a bar, and I don’t understand the menu, it annoys me,” the barman tells me. “A cocktail isn’t cheap. If I’m spending money on a cocktail, I want to know I’m going to like it.”
The Soho House signature cocktail is a picante: tequila, agave syrup, fresh lime juice, coriander leaves, garnished with a chilli. In preparation for the opening party, a picante trolley is being prepared: you pick your favourite tequila, and one of 15 chillies, graded for fieriness and flavour. (I asked the very chic French barman: he recommends the bright yellow Peruvian aji limon.) Judging by Friday night’s party, the picante trolley will be a hit. “In France, we don’t put chilli in everything. But in the UK, you love a chilli,” he says. (Also: tequila. The most popular spirit everywhere, now outselling vodka and gin – a trend imported from the US, and now felt across Britain and Europe.)
For the past five years, newspaper headlines about Soho House have been about financial woes. A stock exchange listing in 2021 was followed by torrid years in which members complained about overexpansion, while investors bemoaned a lack of profitability. The business priorities of being a public company, and the demands of a clientele who prized exclusivity, proved a mismatch. In 2024 The Guardian called Soho House “a victim of its own success”.
Why didn’t going public work? “I wouldn’t exactly say it didn’t work,” says Carnie, with an almost imperceptible bristle. “We went public for all the right reasons, and the experience helped us figure out how to run the business.” But in August this year, the strategy was reversed in a $2.7bn deal with investors, including the actor Ashton Kutcher, taking it private again. “We are better as a private company,” says Carnie. “We can slow down growth a little bit and focus on making our existing members happy.” As founder, Jones is still closely involved on all aspects of design and creative, and Carnie speaks to him all the time, but as CEO, he runs the show, a job which sometimes involves “dragging our girls” – he has three, aged 18, 15 and 10 – to look in on Soho Houses at weekends. “I work a lot.”
Christine Cort OBE, who co-founded the Manchester international festival in 2005 and is a member of Soho House Manchester’s founding committee, is at Friday’s party. She can’t wait to see Primal Scream – and to get in the pool, when it opens in a few weeks. “When we set up an arts festival in Manchester 20 years ago, people said, ‘Oh, that won’t work in Manchester. That’s a London thing,’” she says. “But Manchester has changed dramatically.” It is, she points out, nothing if not a dynamic city: the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and the Suffragette movement. “Already on the committee I’ve met a florist, stylists, club promoters – I’ve made friends I never would have met. And because it’s Manchester, it’s really not about famous people, or people-watching. It’s about collaboration and friendship – and having a really good time.”
