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Nothing is more English than the club. When Phileas Fogg, that imaginary London gentleman, set off around the world in 80 days, he started from the Reform Club. Just around the corner, in St James's Street, Britain's finest young men used to while away an afternoon after a club lunch by playing golf, teeing off and holing out from the steps of one club to the next. Trollope scribbled away in one, as did Dickens, Thackeray, Stevenson, Burton and Kipling. Lord Glasgow threw a waiter through the window of his club and ordered him "put on the bill". The father of the current Duke of Devonshire, ill-tempered late in life, filled the end of his walking-stick with lead and terrorised the shins of fellow-members of Brooks's. As Dr Johnson wrote: "A man is good for nothing unless he is clubbable."

If the idea of the British Empire begins at Camelot, then the origins of the gentlemen's clubs lie in the Round Table. At the turn of the century, London's West End (principally Pall Mall and St James's) could boast 200 such clubs, exclusively male. Now, with the Empire in tatters, most of the 40-odd surviving clubs admit wives for lunch or dinner: Britannia waives the rules. (Waives but only reluctantly changes: despite its previous reputation as one of the least misogynistic of the clubs, the Garrick in late July voted overwhelmingly to reject women as members. As columnist Peregrine Worsthorne put it, "In the presence of women, most men try to put their best foot forward, and being on one's best behavior is not what most of us regard the Garrick as for.")

Although today's clubs are financially better-run than before, the waiting lists shorter and membership fees higher (averaging upwards of $1200 a year), the character of these "mausoleums of inactive masculinity" has not changed much. The dream of Empire still lives on within.

They began as coffee-houses in the late 18th Century, gathering-places where the politically like-minded could read a paper, hear gossip, perhaps gamble, and fuel up for the stagger or horse-carriage to the next. Many took their names from the servants who started them, such as Boodle's, Brooks's, or White's (the oldest gentlemen's club in London, named for an Italian, Bianco, who founded it as a chocolate shop in 1693). Some were militarily inclined, including the Guards and the Cavalry, which merged a decade ago. Some, like the Beefsteak, were originally so secretive and private that a team of unknowing bobbies could raid it mistakenly as a brothel and find seated at an upstairs table the Lord Chancellor, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Governor of the Bank

of England and the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour.

According to V. S. Pritchett, in London Perceived (1962), it was only in the late 19th Century, when industrial wealth took hold, that the clubs (like the public schools) became pretentiously exclusive. The fashion was to be a member of more than one. To many, like Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock's brother, the club was a home away from home, where a man could spend the day eating, drinking, reading and sleeping, with a night valet to turn him over and make sure he hadn't died in his armchair. Men coming back from the corners of the Empire could instantly catch up in their club. For the aged it was a solace; one old duke passed his days seated in the high bow window of Boodle's when it rained because he loved "watching the damn people get wet".

And there is something, too, in the English soul that does not love a wife. As one wag put it, "The French and Italians seek solace by taking mistresses I the British retreat into a world of leather-bound misogyny." But the history of the club is more a full-blooded charge than a retreat. A Victorian lady noted in her diary, "We have now been married exactly a year, in which time my husband has dined with me but once. Every other night he dined at Mr Brooks's Club."

More to the point, these clubs were places where gentlemen could behave like schoolboys, grumbling and shouting and throwing food at the waiters and each other. "London is made for males," as Pritchett puts it, "and its clubs for males who prefer armchairs to women I The boredom that hangs like old cigar smoke in the air is a sad reminder of the most puzzling thing in the sex war: that men like each other, rather as dogs like each other. The food is dull, but a point the ladies overlook is that the wine is excellent and cheap."

The anecdotes are legion. The poet Swinburne was asked to resign from his club when, not being able to find his top hat in the cloakroom, he jumped on all the others until a porter reminded him he'd come hatless that evening. Evelyn Waugh, grumpy as ever, violently dressed down an employee who couldn't get him a taxi in the rain. Henry James lived for more than 20 years at the Reform Club and had his bedroom drilled with a spyhole -- still there -- so the night porter would not disturb him in his sleep. "A club was indispensable," James wrote in his notebooks. "I could not have remained in London without it, and I have become extremely fond of it, a deep local attachment."

All clubs were rivals, usually over which had the worst food -- one's own, you see, always had the best members, a far more important provender. One Guards' clubman who'd given hospitality to Savile clubmen was asked what he thought of them. "They were quite decent little fellows," he replied. "No trouble. Make their own trousers, of course."

Architecturally the great surviving clubs are of a type: their facades like Italianate palazzi, so popular in the early 19th Century; the enormous interior staircases, morning rooms, drawing rooms and classical libraries. Sometimes they have been used as literary settings, from P. G. Wodehouse to Graham Greene (The Human Factor) to one of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, in which the crime rests upon the singular fact that the particular club insists that its waiters and gentlemen dress identically. This is fantasy, but in Pratt's all of the waiters are called "George", and at the Beefsteak, "Charles".

A short list of five of the most illustrated clubs might include the Athenaeum, Boodle's, the Garrick, the Travellers' and White's. All eschew publicity of any sort. Only the Travellers' agreed, very courteously, to show me around.

The Athenaeum (founded 1824) is not known for fine cuisine. Sir Ralph Richardson thought it a good idea to bring a box-lunch; Sir Edwin Lutyens criticised "a piece of cod which passeth all understanding". Years ago, the chef of the French Ambassador, learning that his master was going to the club for dinner, murmured, "Alas, our poor master, we shall never see him again."

The Athenaeum is esteemed, rather, for intellectual dignity, grave silence, and an enormous library, and for being the haunt of many a peer, aristocrat and archbishop. Members are expected to be "established" professionally, so much so that when, in Noel Coward's Present Laughter, a character is accused of becoming pompous after having joined, he replies, "I've always been too frightened to go into it."

Kipling described the Athenaeum as like "a cathedral between services". A more recent visitor portrayed it as full of fogeys who "hobble from room to room muttering about the decline of the Times". Like most of the clubs, it has the dozen-odd bedrooms for members who come down to London for several days'business. Trollope used it thus, and was there persuaded to kill off the character of Mrs Proudie by overhearing two clergymen complaining about his over-use of her. In the mid-19th Century there was a 16-year waiting list of prospective members. But, as one member complained at the time: "They crept in unseen at the doors, and they crept in under the bishops' sleeves, and they crept in in peers' pockets, and they were blown in by the winds of chance."

Boodle's (founded 1762), in the good old days, used to iron the newspapers and boil the shillings and pence before bringing them to members. The servants wore black knee-breeches, in what the writer R. S. Surtees called its"proverbial serenity". Another Victorian described it more affectionately as"a sweet old mahogany and wax candle kind of place". The popular story within was that if a servant in the smoking room called out, "Carriage for Sir John|" a good portion of the members present would glance up. It is famous for a painting by Stubbs and a membership of country gentlemen, knights, the late Adam Smith and Beau Brummel. Churchill used to smoke his cigar at the bow window. It is still considered perhaps the most tranquil and discreet of all the clubs.

Appropriate, then, that Ian Fleming, who usually lunched at Boodle's, made M, the head of Her Majesty's Secret Service in the James Bond books, a member and frequent luncher, fictionalising the place as Blade's. (Fleming had left White's "because they gas too much" -- he wanted a dull club.) In The Man With The Golden Gun, M ignores what Fleming soberly calls "the finest cold buffet on display at that date anywhere in the world".

The Garrick (founded 1831) is famous for being the most bohemian of the old clubs. It is reputed to possess the finest dining room, candlelit and decorated with old theatrical prints that represent the traditional membership favoring writers, actors and directors. It is said also to have the finest dinner conversation. Prince Charles joined a few years ago, leaping ahead of the others on the 10-year waiting list to sport the salmon-and-cucumber striped tie. One of the more financially secure clubs, the Garrick lives off the royalties of the late member A. A. Milne. As long as Winnie-the-Pooh collects honey, the Garrick is safe.