Features

Out of the Centre: Exploring the Meaning of the Word 'Eccentric'

On the drifting meaning of a single word - why the late Lord Bath spent a lifetime declining it, how a national…

Mind That Steinway in the Potting Shed

There was a grand piano in the shed. There was a childhood split between Beaconsfield and Beverly Hills, a foxtrot down Sunset…

A Big Bean in a Small Can: Forty Years On

In 1986, a computer technician from Port Talbot climbed into a bath of baked beans and stayed there for a hundred hours.…

The Freedom of the Peculiar: Vote on London's Most Eccentric Borough

We have shortlisted five contenders for London's most eccentric borough — and then decided to let you be the judge. Read the…

Music, Monkeys, and a Moat of Tea

He emptied his grandfather's shed to build an imaginary chocolate-biscuit machine. Forty years on, he is still doing much the same thing…

The Rakes' Progress

One of them wrote a Reformation rap battle between Luther and Leo X. The other canoed under the Rialto singing "Greensleeves" until…

The Del Boy of the Forties

He played every wide boy, tipster, black-marketeer and fast-talking chancer that the British cinema of the rationed years required — and it…

The Wider Circle: London's Eccentric Scene

Beyond our own club, the flame of eccentricity burns bright across the capital and the Home Counties. So here is our field…

How Eccentric is Downing Street?

Long before Downing Street acquired its latest occupant, Britain had entrusted its fortunes to an extraordinary procession of tree-fellers, tricyclists, theologians, dandies,…

The Eccentric Charigs

Wes Anderson had The Royal Tenenbaums. The Eccentric Club knew the Charigs — meet a court jeweller dozing under the club clock,…

The Fabulous Czainskis

He stuffed a dead pigeon and got the legs on backwards. She waded into the river at Hebden Bridge to rescue a…

The Six Faces of Lucy Freud

She spent a year at art school under her married name, saying nothing. Then she turned out the lights.

Dare To Be Eccentric?

Since the eighteenth century, the Eccentric Club has celebrated originality, fellowship and independent thought. Yet in an age of culture wars, cancellation…