A 106-year-old working men's club in Droitwich shut its doors earlier this month. The committee cited the usual culprits, rising operating costs, building repairs, debt. The same week, in Cleethorpes, another club went down. Monks Road in Lincoln went in 2018 after a century of trade. The Louth Conservative Working Men's Club rebranded in 2023, dropping the "Conservative", dropping "Working Men's", trying to stay alive as Louth Social Club after membership fell from a thousand to three hundred. The Club and Institute Union itself, the federation that has stitched these places together since 1862, has quietly cut "Working Men" from its own name.

Three-quarters of the country's working men's clubs have closed in the last fifty years. In the 1970s the CIU listed about four and a half thousand affiliated clubs and four million members, a tenth of the adult population. The current figure is around eleven hundred, with some recent counts putting it under a thousand.

It would be tidy to blame the 2007 smoking ban, and people do. The ban hurt, of course. But the decline was already a long-running project, sitting underneath the headline cause. The mines went first, then the mills, then the engineering shops that named the clubs they sponsored. Once the works closed, the membership pool dried up, because the membership pool was the works. A Railwaymen's Club without railwaymen is a strange room. The smoking ban only finished a thing that deindustrialisation had already arranged.

The interiors are what people miss without knowing they miss them, and the interiors are what cannot be photographed back into existence. Flock wallpaper. Formica bar tops curving round to a glass-fronted display of crisps and pork scratchings. A concert stage at one end with a curtained backdrop and a small electric organ. A bingo board screwed to the wall behind the bar, numbered cards in a wooden rack. A committee room with leatherette chairs and minutes in a ringbinder. None of this is heritage in any official sense. There is no listing, no fund, no preservation society. When the building goes, the whole grammar of the room goes with it.

What's properly hauntological about the working men's club is that it was the kind of social institution the internet has not replaced and cannot replace, and yet it has not been mourned as a loss. A bounded community, geographically anchored, with a printed membership card that admitted you to two thousand other rooms exactly like this one in towns you'd never visit. You could walk into a CIU club in Wakefield with a card from Workington and be served. The card was a passport into a country that has now closed its borders.

Like the village hall at Balcombe, these were the institutional architecture of working-class self-organisation, built before the welfare state arrived to do some of the same work, and now outliving the world that made them make sense. The buildings persist longer than their function. A shuttered concert room with the bingo board still on the wall is not a ruin yet, only a room waiting to be turned into flats.

Reverend Henry Solly, who founded the CIU in 1862, was a teetotaler who wanted alternatives to the pub. The members, within three years, voted the alcohol back in. That tells you everything about who the institution actually belonged to. It belonged to them, and they ran it, and now it is closing because there are fewer of them left, and the ones who remain are tired.

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