'Ideally, you want to have someone there who has been recently cancelled, as everyone wants to speak to them': How to throw London's best party

Arguably the greatest party London has ever seen was the coronation of Henry VIII in 1509. The Tudor King was determined to upstage Edward I, who had ordered 22,460 chickens for his own coronation in 1274, and, aged only 17, was fizzing with the predictable buzz of a teenage boy with a crown on his head.

Henry’s bash, held at Westminster Hall, featured wine-flowing fountains, jousting and (clutch your pearls) a personal detail assigned to their ladyships who had to crawl under the table to rearrange their dresses whenever they needed to urinate. Debauchery? Darling, it barely touches the sides.

The closest we have come to such a bacchanal in recent times — that we know of — was in 2004, when Kate Moss threw her 30th birthday party inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book The Beautiful And The Damned. As with all the most legendary parties, accounts may vary, but the canonical reading is as follows. Serena Rees, co-founder of luxury lingerie label Agent Provocateur, and filmmaker Sam Taylor-Wood (later Taylor-Johnson) hosted two adjoining parties for the newly tricenarian model at their north London homes — one was ‘The Beautiful’, the other ‘The Damned’ — before the night progressed to a penthouse at Claridge’s, where Moss danced with Ronnie Wood, Marianne Faithfull and other cultural heavyweights until morning. It is the heady mix of stars, almost symbolic in their potency, for which the party is remembered — more than the alleged extracurriculars.

‘The right mix of people is the most essential party trick,’ says Anna Van Praagh, former deputy editor of ES Magazine and chief content officer of The Standard, who, throughout her career, has been lucky enough to attend some of the best bashes of her generation. ‘It is not so much about the great and the good as it is the great and the bad. You want a few serious people present, but only a few. Important people are often very dull and a host’s job is to make sure no guest is stuck for too long with anyone boring.’

As London heads into silly season, parties are being held every night across the capital. Society doyennes, diary journalists and fixtures of ‘The Scene’ are often contending with five or six different invitations an evening. It’s a nice problem to have for those who have it — but choosing which party to attend can be tricky. What could be the night of your life equally could end up a damp squib.

The greatest parties, often, are those that take you by surprise. ‘The best dos are the most spontaneous,’ says Dean Piper, a former celebrity journalist-turned-VIP strategist. ‘I’ve had more fun at baby showers that went on until the wee hours than at most film-premiere after parties.’ The best bash yours truly has attended this year was no doubt Yotam Ottolenghi’s harvest party, an event that may conjure an image of the labneh class reciting incantations around a giant courgette, but was, in fact, a hoedown of the highest order, attended by such names as Helen Fielding and Nigella Lawson. ‘Bad behaviour is very important,’ believes Van Praagh, ‘and a lot more likely to occur if you have enough young people present who don’t have much to lose.’ Attractive waiters are also a must.

To those hosting the parties, the pressure of competition can be fatal. As anxiety clouds judgement, priorities can be forsaken for nonsense. Ham-fisted attempts at entertainment or organised fun rarely fly. ‘I was always confused by the parties thrown at Sushisamba,’ says Piper, of the restaurant in the Heron Tower, EC2. ‘They’d hire these Brazilian people in carnival costumes — we’re talking full headdresses — that always struck me as bizarre and made the entire event feel claustrophobic.

‘I think any form of entertainment that puts the party on pause is a no-no,’ the former hack continues, ‘except the time that Amy Winehouse got up on stage at the Sanderson Hotel after the Brit Awards in 2004, to serenade us.’ Wine-flowing fountains à la Henry VIII are fine; trapeze artists or ballet solos are not. Only one place, Piper suggests, gets the entertainment right. ‘The Goring nails it. Sure, they have singers and magicians and the whole thing is a bit much — but it feels authentic to the hotel. You can tell that the staff love it, too, which makes a big difference.’

If entertainment is usually best avoided, on what should a host be sure to focus? ‘Music is far and away the most important thing,’ says Serena Connolly, head of under-35s membership at The Birley Clubs, which includes The George, Annabel’s, and Mark’s Club. ‘I could drink not a drop of alcohol and still dance until 5am if the music is good. If the music is bad, I’m out in under an hour.’ Van Praagh agrees, although believes that ‘weapons-grade alcohol’ is important. ‘You want people to get drunk quickly.’

Of course, a party needs more than mere music and drinks to deliver the ‘wow’ factor its punters are chasing. A cursory look at London’s greatest dos suggests that this is a must: the last Frost Fair of 1814 involved an elephant crossing the Thames; the 1994 premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral would not have gone down in history had Elizabeth Hurley not worn that Versace dress; and Sir Elton John’s 50th birthday, held at Hammersmith Palais, is legendary not only because he dressed up as Louis XIV, but because his costume involved a 3ft-tall wig that balanced a miniature Spanish warship and working cannon on its crest.

The most effective way of creating ‘a moment’ without interrupting the flow of the party, Van Praagh says, is via the guest list. ‘You want someone there whom no one is expecting to see,’ she explains. That doesn’t mean someone necessarily more famous or ‘above- grade’, but rather someone incongruous. ‘What made parties in the Noughties so exciting,’ says Van Praagh, ‘was the fact that you could be chatting with Noel Gallagher one minute and with A. C. Grayling the next.’

For Connolly, the best way to produce that memorable moment is through a performance that doesn’t put the evening on pause, but rather weaves into it. Attending The George’s summer party together in July, the downstairs bar filled with people trying to catch a glimpse of Sophie Ellis-Bextor, who performed a set of floor-fillers for an hour in between DJ sets (her cover of Like A Prayer has lived in my head rent-free ever since). The right ‘moment’, she suggests, ‘should only bring more people onto the dancefloor’.

If, up until the early days of the Instagram era, a ‘moment’ could easily be created with an outfit going viral online (think of Rihanna’s Guo Pei dress worn at the Met Gala in 2015 that was instantly likened to an omelette), a party is now more likely to become a talking point by foregoing any digital presence; banning phones and cameras and shrouding the event in secrecy. ‘Celebrity parties are all going phone-free,’ Piper says. ‘Take Poppy Delevingne’s 40th birthday this summer. Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce and Rita Ora were all there, yet no one was allowed to “pap” them. That made it a lot more enticing to those who weren’t present and ensured that it was talked about for weeks afterwards.

‘There is a movement of people wanting to bring back the “behind-closed-doors” ethos of the parties of yore,’ Piper continues. ‘All the best stuff happens after the Getty photographer has finished his shift.’ A great guest list, once more, does the heavy lifting. ‘Ideally,’ says Van Praagh, ‘you want to have someone there who has been recently cancelled, as everyone wants to speak to them.’

I wanted to put this latest theory to the test and, thinking I knew exactly which party might follow such a rule, emailed the head of events at The Spectator and asked if I could attend their Young Readers’ event as a reporter. Charming as it was, I was disappointed to find not one controversial person there — not even Douglas Murray — and asked attendees, mostly young men in their mid-to-late twenties, whether they agreed the party could have been enlivened by throwing someone controversial into the mix.

‘What do you mean by controversial?’ one quibbled. ‘Do you mean [the chairman] Charles Moore? Because he’s just over there.’ ‘No,’ I answered, ‘I do not mean Charles Moore. I didn’t think he was controversial. I mean someone properly cancelled like Peter Mandelson.’ My audience shrugged. One of our party, two drinks deep, began to round on Rory Stewart, co-host of The Rest Is Politics and scourge of the alt-right. ‘He is so annoying,’ he said irascibly. ‘Thinks he knows everything.’ People around us agreed. I concluded that a feather-ruffler is indeed a good party trick, yet different crowds have different triggers. Putting the cat among the pigeons depends on the cat and the pigeons.

A good venue also goes a long way. The Spectator, still host of one of the most exclusive summer parties around, is blessed with a townhouse that backs onto St James’s Park and a garden that looks bigger than it actually is. At full capacity, one cannot swing a purse without knocking out several politicians and at least one host of The Newsagents podcast.

London’s premiere party destination in recent decades was the Chiltern Firehouse, yet after that shut down due to a fire in 2024, others muscled in to claim the crown. The strongest substitute so far has been The Standard, King’s Cross, a hotel designed by Archer Humphries and Shawn Hausman (the man behind Hollywood Canteen and Bar Marmont in Los Angeles), which hopes to hold onto it when Chiltern reopens in late 2027. Sweeties, the hotel’s penthouse bar, is a pick for today’s album release parties and more intimate soirées are often held in Townhouse Eight, an apartment with its own bar and kitchen. The whole thing is soundproof, as are the suites that tend to host the afterparties.

No phones, no breaks in the set list, soundproof walls and handsome waiters: anything else needed to throw the party of the year? ‘Yes,’ says Van Praagh. ‘Always bring a pack of cigarettes, whether you smoke or not. All the right people smoke and, if you brandish cigarettes obviously enough, they will flock towards you like a moth to a flame.’

This article first appeared in the October 7 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.