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Members’ club

Radworth Working Men’s Club

Bestholme Boulevard, Plot P7

The carvery counter in a working men's club: steel pans of roast potatoes, carrots, peas and greens, joints of meat on boards at the far end, and rows of red chairs at long tables behind.

Nineteen thirty-two, red brick, Crittall windows and a hipped tiled roof, with a white faience surround round the double doors and the club’s name picked out in a band along the parapet. Built by people who worked shifts and wanted somewhere to go afterwards that was theirs.

Inside it is one big concert room. A stage at one end with a red drape, a piano and two lighting bars; a polished dance floor kept clear in front of it; six long banqueting tables with eight red chairs apiece, fluted bench seating under the windows, and low pine screens with brass rails dividing the floor into the places people have always sat.

By the door is the members’ desk, where you sign the book, and beside it a glazed case with the fixtures, the subs and the committee minutes pinned up inside. There is an honours board, a clock, and a pair of fruit machines against the wall.

The bar runs twelve metres down the side of the room: three keg fonts, two hand pumps, a post-mix tower, a till and a glass washer, with the mirrored back-fittings set between the windows so that every pane still lets the daylight in.

And in the middle of the floor, the carvery. It is laid out as an upside-down U, the meat at the closed end under the heat lamps (pork, lamb, beef and turkey, on the joint) and everything else coming back the other way: Yorkshires shaped to hold the gravy, roast potatoes, runner beans, carrots, sprouts, cabbage, mash, cauliflower cheese and broccoli, then the gravy, then horseradish, cranberry and mustard, last, as the club has always insisted. Seventeen things at one price, eight pounds ninety-five, and the plates are cobalt blue, printed with oak leaves and acorns.

The joints are out under the lamps and the chairs are in their rows. What the committee is still sorting out is who is going to carve.

The Working Men’s Club is built and dressed, down to the committee minutes in the notice case and the acorns on the plates. Opening it up, with staff behind the bar and somebody on the carvery, is on the list.

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