This Historic Grade II Listed London Social Club Is A Hidden Retro Time Capsule

London is certainly no stranger to the limelight when it comes to Taylor Swift. Her love of the Big Smoke has been extremely well-documented over the years. And now, yet another of the city’s spots can add ‘Swift-approved’ to its Instagram bio, as a Stoke Newington social club was one of the lucky London locales to have featured as the backdrop to Taylor’s latest music video, Opalite.

The Mildmay Club

Established back in 1888, the rather iconic institution originally set up shop as the ‘Mildmay Radical Club’ and was initially involved in radical politics and social campaigns. The club certainly wasn’t to everybody’s taste, with the vicar of the nearby church hailing it a ‘pernicious influence among the young’.

The club moved to its current location on Newington Green in 1894, and the building as we now know it (a Grade II listed building designed by club member, Alfred Allen) was completed in 1900. The club dropped its ‘radical’ title in 1930, becoming a non-political working men’s club. And well… the rest is history, really.

The venue is now a community hub, open to all, with a members bar, a snooker hall, and two halls used for social events. Entering the Mildmay Club is like stepping into a retro time capsule, with its perfectly preserved 60s and 70s interiors and nostalgia served up by the bucket-load. It’s had its fair share of screentime over the years, having been used as a filming location for the likes of Killing Eve, Baby Reindeer, and Call the Midwife (just to name a few). But the most recent claim to fame is, quite possibly, the most impressive of all.

Taylor Swift’s ‘Opalite’ music video

The recently-released Opalite music video saw the club transformed into a retro 90s dance hall in which Taylor and Domhnall Gleeson partake in a competition whilst sporting matching shell-suits. The concept of the music video came about in a rather unconventional way – but then again, would we expect anything less from Swift at this point? Taylor appeared on the Graham Norton Show last year to promote her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, and she was joined on the Red Sofa by Domhnall Gleeson, Cillian Murphy, Greta Lee, Jodie Smith, and Lewis Capaldi. During the show, Gleeson made a joke about wanting to appear in a Taylor Swift music video – and his wish was clearly Swift’s command. She wrote up the script (with Gleeson as the starring role), and sent it over to him the very next week. Don’t ask, don’t get, and all that jazz…

Taylor took to Instagram following the release of the Opalite video and said: “I had this thought that it would be wild if all of our fellow guests on the Graham Norton show that night, including Graham himself, could be a part of it too. Like a school group project but for adults and it isn’t mandatory. To my delight, everyone from the show made the effort to time travel back to the 90’s with us and help with this video.”

The Mildmay Club wasn’t the only London spot to earn itself a role in the music video. Croydon’s Whitgift Centre was also featured, and the south London spot’s unlikely appearance in the video has well-and-truly sent the city spiraling. But more on that another time, hey?

📍You’ll find the Mildmay Club at 33-34 Newington Green, N16 9PR.