How to Visit the Hurlingham Club: London's Private Club Open Day

The Hurlingham Club is the most private 42 acres in London. It sits on the Thames in Fulham behind a long brick wall, has a waiting list that closed in 2018, and does not let you in. Except for one day a year, when it opens its gardens for the National Garden Scheme and anyone with a ticket can walk through the gate.

I first went in May 2022 and went back in May 2026, and I would go every year if they let me. This is what is behind the wall, why it is there, and how to get a ticket for the one day it is open.

What Is the Hurlingham Club?

A private members' club on a riverside estate, with a Georgian house in the middle of it and more sport than seems possible inside a city. Tennis, croquet, cricket, bowls, squash, swimming, a gym. About 13,000 people belong, and roughly 6,000 of those have full voting membership. The waiting list was so long that in 2018 the club stopped adding names to it.

The house is Hurlingham House, built in 1760 for Dr William Cadogan on land leased from the Bishop of London. In 1797 George Byfield gave it the front you see today: a white stucco river facade, nine windows wide, with a pedimented portico of four Corinthian columns and a bow behind it. Sir Edwin Lutyens added a terrace on the river side in 1906. It is listed Grade II*.

Why Was the Hurlingham Club Founded?

To shoot pigeons. Frank Heathcote founded the club in 1869 as an agreeable country resort for live pigeon shooting, and that is still why there is a pigeon on the club's crest. The shooting stopped in 1905.

What made the club famous was polo. The first match was played here on 6 June 1874, between the Royal Horse Guards and the Monmouthshire Polo Club. Hurlingham wrote the rules of the game in 1873, hosted the first England versus United States international in 1886, and the polo at the 1908 London Olympics. For seventy years it was the headquarters of polo for the whole British Empire.

Then it lost the polo grounds. After the Second World War the London County Council compulsorily purchased them for housing and a public park. In 1951 they became Hurlingham Park, the open space you pass on the way in. The club kept the house, the lake and the gardens. Polo came back to the park, briefly, with Polo in the Park from 2009.

What Do You See on the Hurlingham Club Open Day?

The gardens, mainly, and they are the point. The lake is believed to have been dug from a natural creek of the Thames in 1740. It came with Mulgrave House, the neighbouring estate the club bought in 1879 and demolished in 1927. In May its banks are thick with purple Siberian iris, and a white wooden bridge crosses the narrow end, dripping with wisteria. There are black swans on it, which I have never seen anywhere else in London, and they behave as if they know whose lake it is.

The wisteria is the reason to go in May rather than any other month. There is a long pergola walk of it, a tunnel of lilac hanging almost to head height, and it is the single thing I would cross London for in the second week of May. Walk it slowly, twice.

Some years the open day catches it perfectly. Some years it is a week past, and you get the laburnum instead, which is yellow and almost as good, and grows beside the old lamp posts on the path to the lake.

Beyond the lake is the river walk, planted after the Thames flooded the grounds in 1929. The London planes along it probably date from the eighteenth century, and there is a jetty from 1939. The great storm of October 1987 took out forty mature trees here, so what looks like an untouched landscape is one that has been rebuilt more than once.

Humphry Repton advised on the landscape and wrote about Hurlingham in his book of 1803. You will read elsewhere that Capability Brown designed the grounds. There is no evidence for that, and Brown died in 1783, twenty years before Repton wrote about the place. The lake predates both of them.

Can You Go Inside Hurlingham House?

The club lets visitors into parts of the house on the open day, and it is worth going in. The drawing rooms have painted and gilded ceilings, panels of flowers and ribbons in the Georgian manner, with marble fireplaces underneath and red velvet armchairs arranged for people who are not in a hurry. Look up. The ceilings are the thing.

The detail repays a slow look: ribbons, garlands, small painted flowers in each panel, and the chain of the chandelier dropping through the middle of it all.

The colonnade on the garden side has cafe tables under striped awnings, and on the open day there are refreshments. The croquet lawns in front are in play. On my visits the members carried on with their game while the rest of us walked past with cameras, and nobody seemed to mind.

Little Wimbledon: The Tennis Tournament Before Wimbledon

Every June, in the week before the Championships at Wimbledon, the Hurlingham Club stages its own tournament on its grass courts. It has run since 1994 as an exhibition warm-up, and the players use it to get their eye in on grass. Nadal, Djokovic, Murray and Alcaraz have all played it. Since 2022 it has been called the Giorgio Armani Tennis Classic, and members call it Little Wimbledon.

Like Wimbledon, tennis here is played in whites. I love that. Something about a row of grass courts, everybody in white, and a Georgian house behind them makes London feel like it stopped in about 1925 and decided to stay there. If you can get a ticket through a hospitality package it is a very good afternoon, and the crowds are a fraction of SW19.

Why I Keep Going Back

Because of the exclusivity, if I am honest, and because of the landscape. This is one of my favourite spots in London. Whenever we visit we find a table, order a steak and a glass of prosecco, and spend the afternoon pretending we are members. We are probably ruining the real members' day. We are not sorry.

It is the combination that does it. The lake, the black swans, the wisteria tunnel, the croquet, the white clothes, the house with its painted ceilings. It is all so completely of a piece, and so completely private, that one day inside it feels like a much longer holiday.

When Is the Hurlingham Club Open to the Public?

One Saturday in May, for the National Garden Scheme, the charity that opens private gardens for a day to raise money for nursing and health charities. The date moves each year. It has fallen on the second or third Saturday in May in the years I have checked. The club's page on the NGS website lists the next one once it is fixed, usually in the spring.

Tickets are booked in advance through the NGS website and they sell out. Set a reminder in March. The opening runs from mid-morning to mid-afternoon, dogs are not allowed, and most of the grounds are level enough for a wheelchair, though the smaller woodchip paths through the borders are harder work.

There is no other way in without a member. The club does not do public tours, and the wall is high.

Visiting the Hurlingham Club: Practical Notes

📍 Address: The Hurlingham Club, Ranelagh Gardens, London SW6 3PR. The entrance is on Ranelagh Gardens, beside Hurlingham Park.

🚉 Getting there: Putney Bridge station on the District line is about five minutes' walk. The club gate is on Ranelagh Gardens, the road that runs beside the station.

🎫 Cost: A few pounds per adult, booked in advance through the National Garden Scheme. All of it goes to the charities the scheme supports.

🕒 Opening: One Saturday in May each year, mid-morning to mid-afternoon. Check the NGS listing for the date and times.

☕ Food: There is food and drink on the open day, and the steak and a glass of prosecco under the colonnade is the tradition in our house. Cashless only.

⏳ How long to allow: Two hours. Longer if the wisteria is out and you are photographing it.

📷 Best time to visit: You do not get a choice, but if the date falls in the second week of May the wisteria and the irises will both be out.

Nearby: Hurlingham Park next door is free and always open. Fulham Palace and its walled garden are fifteen minutes' walk along the river, and Bishops Park runs between the two.

The Hurlingham Club is one of those London places that is famous for being closed. Once a year it is not. For the price of a garden ticket you get a Georgian house, a lake with black swans, the best wisteria tunnel in the city and an afternoon of pretending. Book it.

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All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.