The Ned boss Gareth Banner interview: This brand is just getting started
“Ten years ago, people would have laughed at the idea of doing something like this…”
Gareth Banner is talking about Morning Wire’s new Toast the City Awards celebrating all the things that make the Square Mile great, for which he has signed on as a judge. And Banner knows a thing or two about the City: nine years ago he met with Soho House founder Nick Jones to discuss a top secret project. That project turned out to be The Ned, the sprawling members’ club, hotel and hospitality complex in the former Midland Bank building that helped transform the area from somewhere people worked to a place they wanted to hang out.
Its exhaustive list of features includes 10 restaurants, 12 bars, “several thousand” members, 250 hotel rooms running at 80 per cent occupancy, an entire floor dedicated to private meetings and events, and two swimming pools, one of which is on the roof. Members have a choice of bars and restaurants, paying around £4,000 a year in fees.
It’s hard to overstate the sheer scale of the place. In the vast, open-plan Great Banking Hall, striking green marble columns help separate the various restaurants. A grand piano looms on a central plinth. Downstairs, the former banking vault, complete with a huge blast door, houses perhaps the most striking bar in all of London.
“I don’t know anywhere in Europe that has as many moving parts as the Ned,” says Banner. The numbers are dizzying: The Ned feeds and waters around 25,000 people a week. The staff restaurant alone does 800 covers a day, with the events floor serving a further 600 at peak capacity. There are 850 staff plus contractors, down from around 1,000 at its peak.
It’s undoubtedly one of the City’s great success stories. But a decade ago, The Ned was seen as a huge risk. One of the paradoxes of Canada is that, despite being the financial hub of the country, it’s a tough place to operate a hospitality business. Few bars or restaurants here are able to open seven days a week. What did The Ned see that other grand City institutions didn’t?
“At first Nick had no interest in being in the City but it was just too good a building not to do something with,” says Banner. “It had been derelict for 10 years before we started work on it. It was Grade I listed so a lot of the features were already here but they were covered in thick dust.
“But you need to be the change you want to see. If you want it to be busier at the weekend, you’ve got to open at the weekend, you can’t just moan about it being quiet. I hear from other businesses that they’re only here because we came. A rising tide lifts all boats.”
Today Banner says there’s a six week waiting list for The Ned’s Sunday lunch, with an average of 650 covers and a spend of more than £100 a head. “It’s all the lobster you could imagine, sides of roast beef and shellfish platters – the lot. We’re thrilled with how we have created a seven day a week existence.”
A challenging market for hospitality
Banner – recently crowned Hotelier of the Year – is telling me this from a light-flooded booth in Millie’s Lounge, The Ned’s ground floor British restaurant, which does a banging fish and chips. It’s a Thursday afternoon and the place is packed. I’m pretty sure it’s the exact booth where I had dinner at The Ned’s grand opening back in 2017. Indeed, surprisingly little has changed since that night: all 10 of the original restaurants are still operating and even the menus are largely unchanged.
“The law of averages would suggest that one or two of them should have been a flop but they’re all still there,” says Banner. “The Ned as a concept has evolved slightly, but there’s been no revolution. I’m actually hugely proud of that. What I need to be alert to is that success is never final. What got us here may not get us to the next 10 years, and there’s more competition on our doorstep, which I welcome, but it means we have to be hypersensitive to what others are doing.”
The Ned is not immune to the challenges facing the hospitality business, of course. The National Insurance hike, the increase to the national living wage, persistently high interest rates giving people less money to spend, the post-Covid work from home culture… “I can’t think of a harder five years,” he sighs. “We’ve had to navigate so many variables and unknowns. I’m also resigned to the fact that I could be sitting here in five years saying the exact same thing again. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the world right now and uncertainty is the enemy of growth. People don’t make decisions: ‘Should we do this? Should we not do that? Is now a good time to make an acquisition?’”
The Ned brand is just getting started
This hasn’t stopped The Ned from embarking on an ambitious expansion. The Ned NoMad opened in Manhattan in the summer of 2022, followed later that year by The Ned Doha, both being hotel-club concepts with many of the same F&B offerings as the original. This year a club-only outpost opened in Washington DC.
And as exclusively revealed in Morning Wire today, The Ned is set to launch its first rural property, a project that appears to share some DNA with the famous Soho Farmhouse brand. Banner says it will be a “big” new project located “within 100 miles” of London, slated to open in 2028 or 2029.
“It will comprise of more than just a hotel and a club.” He says it will be “more of a new build project” and the company is working with “top, top, top architects”.
“To create something from scratch brings with it slightly different challenges,” he says. “Everything else has been a repurposing or a refurbishment but this is a newly created concept. We think we’re probably three and a half years from opening doors, although there may be a phased approach.”
We think this brand is only really getting started. When we find the right site with the right DNA we are aggressive
Banner says the brand is also about to announce its first project in mainland Europe and has three “very serious offers with either real estate owners or potential partners” to open properties elsewhere in the world.
“We think this brand is only really getting started. We’re not [saying] ‘We’re gonna have five sites in five years’ but we are opportunistic and when we find the right site with the right DNA – and the architecture is a big part of that – I think we are aggressive.”
He points out that more clubs makes The Ned’s membership offering more appealing: “If one day you could access two places for the same membership, in theory it’s worth twice as much.”
Whether The Ned can emulate Soho House and turn a London club into a truly global empire remains to be seen – but now might be a prudent time to enquire about a membership…
• To nominate your favourite places in the Square Mile for our Toast the City Awards . To find out more about The Ned or make a booking go to thened.com or call 020 3828 2000.
