Tim Gosling invites you to The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, London

Finding a building in London that is one of the great Regency spaces of the time and that is still in use for the purpose it was intended is wonderful. And no building does that better than the Athenaeum, a gentleman's club established in 1824 here, just off Pall Mall. The Athenaeum, along with the British Museum, represents the high watermark of Greek revival architecture in London and its architect, Decimus Burton, was only 24 when he began to work on it. This is an architect who suddenly decides that he's going to create something that is in keeping with everyone else. Nash is designing things in the Roman idiom and he starts, well, I'm going to do this in the Greek idiom. So the idea of establishing almost a new form of architecture, it's still within the classical structures, but he's doing something that's quite different and it's almost straight out of the amphitheatres of ancient Greece. The acanthus leaves, the idea of the column capitals, Athena herself. Then, to top it all off, the Parthenon frieze. I think when you actually sketch something, and certainly when you start looking at the detail and the way things line up, you start getting into the mindset of the designer that created it. What's tantalising is you can start seeing the level of detail and reading the thoughts, almost unravelling it. Decimus Burton was the protégé of the Prince Regent's favourite architect, John Nash, and the young Burton's decision to adopt this Greek style could be seen as a direct challenge to Nash's Roman buildings. I want to show you how this building works inside and out and how it's a brilliant testament to the power of good design. This is a really beautiful book published in the 1830s that Decimus Burton himself would have absolutely known. They're one-to-one drawings of pieces of architecture in Athens, in ancient Athens. And here we have Decimus Burton reinterpreting this into pieces of furniture, creating for the first time an idea in miniature of architecture. And look, a beautiful little lotus leaf nestling into this groove here. It's really remarkable because, for me, this whole building represents, in form, Greek architecture in every single detail. The moment you start drilling down into the detail and you start actually tracing the elements of Greek thoughts and architecture being represented in a completely different new form, you can't help but get excited about the details and things that you're looking at. Charles Dickens, a famous member of this club, wrote, The Athenaeum possesses one of the best clubhouses in London and certainly one of the best club libraries in England. With over 80,000 volumes, many first editions by Dickens, by Thackeray, by Darwin, it really goes to the heart of the Athenaeum and, for me, what good Regency design is all about. It's not only the library here that impresses me. It's actually the pieces of furniture. Every single time you sit in a chair, and this is really comfortable, it's telling you a story. It's telling you something that it wants you to know that relates to the architecture and the interiors. Here we have the most wonderful palmette gadrooned into the top section, tapering down into a lotus blossom, another stylised palmette, and then ending up in a beautiful brass caster. Again, the moment you start looking at all the details, you see wonderful little spandrels here of this incredible staircase that goes all the way up to the top two tiers of the library, with the honeysuckle design and the palmette bits all beautifully produced in this wonderful wrought iron and mahogany stairs. We first saw it when we came into the entrance hall on the downstairs couches. What's beautiful here is you have a scroll bracket going into a double scroll, which is incredibly beautiful. And it has a stylised version of the honeysuckle here coming into a tapered scroll. And this is the pride of the Athenaeum, the great drawing room. Designed by Decimus Burton, it spans the entire front elevation, which is over a hundred foot long. In a letter, Charles Darwin wrote, that I'm sure as I sat in the great drawing room one evening, on a sofa by myself, I felt just like a duke. These are Decimus Burton's original designs from 1829, and for me it's really exciting because you start seeing the front of the building replicated here with the seven windows internally. It's also a debate about which colour scheme is going to be adopted, and the starting point for the design of the bookcases here. The clubs kept with the pominal green and the scagliotti columns are exactly as they were designed. It also has these extraordinary lysocratic capitals. At first glance they look like Corinthian capitals, but they're not. You see the palmette design beautifully placed in the centre, and larger foliage of the acanthus leaf. It's a completely different form of capital. As a furniture designer, the pieces in this club fascinate me, because they make it possible to get into the mind of Burton and the Regency designer. What's really incredible is that this drawing or piece is actually in exactly the same position that it was intended to be in in the 1830s, when it was designed. It's still having the same conversation, and it really stands out as one of the star pieces. There's a pair of them at each end of the drawing room. When you start actually drawing this table in its detail, you start realising how clever it is. You start actually looking at its detail. It's not just a simple base, it's not just a simple turned column. It has little flutes at the bottom, and then it spills out into this incredible lotus leaf design right at the bottom, which is exactly what we've seen in the library and in the hall, but in a completely different mode. Quite often you see great pieces of furniture in museums, but what we've been looking at here today is remarkable pieces of furniture that are still alive. They're in dialogue exactly the same way that Decimus Burton originally attended, and for me, that's really exciting. This club and this wonderful furniture has been in existence for nearly 200 years, and looks like they will continue for many more years to come.