Every day, for about an hour, Luca Maggiora sits in an empty room, turns down the lights, and dreams of the 

 he’s yet to open. “I close my eyes, and then I visualise completely how this is going to be,” he says of Tramp, the storied subterranean den that he recently took over, and which will be reborn under his fresh rule this autumn. “So it’s the opening night and I open the door,” he says (we are sitting on two deep corduroy sofas 100 yards away from the site, which whirrs and hums currently with drills and hammers and people with step ladders; the storm before the calm). “And I think: What do you smell? What do you touch? What do you feel? What kind of people do you have around you? How loud is the music? How long do you have to wait for your main course?” he chants, his eyes shut and his shoulders relaxed now; the Buddha of St James’s. “Are people laughing or reacting or dancing? I imagine everything!” It means, Maggiora explains, that if anything untoward should happen in real life – a minor royal receives a daiquiri to the lap; a Bichon Frisé is loose among the stilettos – he is utterly calm; he is ready; he has already lived it a thousand times before.	

This zen perspective is fitting seeing as Tramp is undergoing a reincarnation. The nightclub was first opened in 1969 by Johnny Gold, who wanted to create a more unruly (and late-night) counterpart to Annabel’s over in Berkeley Square. Gold was known throughout his 30-year rule as a tireless frontman to the club, who, in his own words, “tried to treat the celebrities as ordinary people, and the ordinary people as celebrities”. (Author Jackie Collins memorably painted Gold as “an old whore: always there, always ready for your demands and always prepared to give you a good time”.)

British rock group, the Faces, receive a somewhat understated Tramp reception in 1973. Image: Getty

The result was a discreet, relaxed, and yet fizzy atmosphere that encouraged all kinds of serendipitous shenanigans and legendary occurrences. There was the night three James Bonds dined together at three separate tables by chance, or the incident (possibly apocryphal) where The Who drummer Keith Moon destroyed a chandelier, and the next day strapped himself naked to the bonnet of a car outside the club to protest his ban. “Member number one was Ringo Starr,” says Maggiora now, reeling off the stats like a sports fan. “Number two was Roger Moore. 

 was number 19; Ronnie Wood, 72,” he says. “then Roger Taylor, Eric Clapton, Freddie Mercury – everybody”.

Like Johnny Gold before him, Maggiora says he’ll be at the club every single evening – meeting and greeting every member and often leaving after everybody else. It is, he says, the only way that he knows to run a place. He has been compiling the membership by himself since the spring, and has had hundreds of hour-long sit downs with prospective members. There’s no hard criteria to join the club, beyond the fact that you have to be more than 28 years old. “It doesn’t really matter where you’re from. You can come from the art world, the world of music, of tech...” he says. “Most of the people, I don’t even ask what they do. Because if you’re cool, you’re cool. No matter who you are, no matter how much money you have.” (The one thing he can’t stand, he says, is entitlement in any form.) Tramp will be, in this way, a benevolent dictatorship; a beautiful tyranny of vibes. “Nobody can apply for membership. There are no socials. Nobody can take pictures. I have no committee. I have no ambassadors. It’s me and me only.”	

Naomi Campbell strutting the Tramp catwalk in 1994. Image: Getty

This, Maggiora hopes, will be part of the rich appeal of the place – a nostalgic trip back to a more personable form of hospitality. In a world where LVMH can open venues with vast budgets that don’t need to make money – and thus are able to poach the finest staff left in a post-Brexit London – independent owners only have a couple tricks left at their disposal. One of these is the deeply personal, authentic touch that an individual owner can offer – the type of interaction that the jet-setters of the 1970s would have experienced under Johnny Gold and Mark Birley, say. The other is a degree of time-earned brand heritage that money simply can’t buy. Annabel’s always had that, he says, in the world of nightclubs. And after Annabel’s was acquired, the only prize left, really, was Tramp. In this way, Maggiora is future-proofing a corner of his impressive hospitality empire (which includes Bardo in St James’s, the playful, elegant Italian restaurant) against the club cannibalisation of today. It’s telling, he says, that Tramp was long-described as the ‘Hermès of Nightclubs’ – that great hold-out of independent marques.	

And so, a few years ago, Maggiora began emailing the previous owner, businessman Kevin Doyle, almost weekly, making clear his interest in the place. He received no reply for months and months. “And then, literally out of the blue, I was in Italy and had just arrived in Tuscany – and I received an email.” It was from the owners of Tramp. “And it said: ‘Tomorrow I’m in London for two hours, if you want to come and meet me’.” Maggiora remembers. “I looked at my wife and said, ‘I need to go back. I’ll never get the chance to meet him again’.”

Maggiora did not even negotiate on price, he admits. “I just said ‘fine’.” A few weeks later, with the paperwork all finalised, he was the new owner of Tramp. He closed the club the very next day, in November 2023, and wrote to the 1,800-or-so existing members at once. “I said: ‘Your membership is cancelled, effective immediately.’ And you would be surprised how many hundreds of them wrote back to me saying, “Thank God. Thank you. Tell me you’re going to try to bring it back like it used to be.’”

Mick Jagger definitely midnight rambling at Tramp in 1992. Image: Getty

Maggiora spoke to dozens of old members – including the son of Johnny Gold – some who were in their thirties, some well into their eighties, and several who claimed proudly that they’d been to the ‘University of Tramp’. The general consensus was that, in recent years, the leadership at the club had stopped showing the place the intense degree of care and love it required, and things had slowly slipped: service; detail; mood. Many members had stopped bothering to come, and those that did go arrived late, after carousing elsewhere. “The place was empty before midnight every night,” Maggiora says. His aim now is to make it more clubby and less night-clubby. There’s no set dance floor, because this is not a wedding in a marquee, and because everyone knows that the best dance floors are improvised ones. Design gurus Campbell-Rey have been drafted in to conduct a sleek, inviting and swaddling restoration of the low-level site, which places more of a premium on backgammon than breakdancing.

With just a few weeks to go before the official opening, I ask Maggiora if he is nervous about the club’s return. Not in the slightest, he offers, he’s opened 18 venues before. He’ll only be nervous if no one comes. His track record in London hospitality is still formidable, and its twists and turns neatly follow the changing fortunes of nightlife in the city. “The golden period of nightclubs,” he says. “Started in about 2006, and lasted maybe 10 years.” This was the boomtime, he says, of EDM, of Swedish House Mafia holding court at Nikki Beach, and, perhaps most importantly, of ostentatious bottle service and competitive Dom Pérignon. “But what used to be cool back in the day – it’s just not cool anymore,” Maggiora says. The rise of Instagram made the VIP club experience all the more visible, which soon made it feel less exclusive and more overdone. At the same time, conspicuous consumption began to feel less tasteful in the wake of the financial crisis and Brexit. Add to this the trend for quiet luxury, which changed the aesthetic value of the nightclub, too. It is hard to pair a giant gold bottle of Ace of Spades with a demure navy cashmere twin-set. “You can see really clearly in the past two or three years that going back to the past is what people want,” says Maggiora. “We want social discretion, privacy and class. I don’t want you to take a picture. I want to have a good environment where I feel safe with my friends.”

Most of all, he says, people want to have fun. At some point in the past decade or so, nightclubs, quite remarkably, forgot that their main purpose was to foster a certain hedonism, a self-expression, a letting-loose. The dead-eyed, model-lined tables of certain super clubs in recent years would be utterly unrecognisable to the jolly carnage of Studio 54, say. And so fun, for Maggiora, is the constant watchword. “Tramp has to be fun. I meet all these people, and no matter what the background, from 35 to 70, they tell me: ‘Luca, we want to have fun. We just don’t know where anymore. We end up having a house party at home, but really, we just want to have fun’.” The recipe for this is pretty simple, he says, in the way that really difficult things often are. Good music (one question on the membership form is ‘what kind of music do you like?’), played by people who can acutely read a room, and a good-natured mix of friendly members who aren’t too burdened by snobbery, ego or entitlement.

To these timeless constants, we might add another, more modern, concern: a gentle, warm sense of nostalgia and ease. Each member will be given a key that opens the door and which lets the staff know who’s about to enter. Maggiora will likely be there to greet them anyway, he says. When he takes them downstairs to the bar that now sits directly opposite the grand, descending steps, the barmen will know their names, too, and begin to pour them their favourite drink. Phones will be discouraged, with no real wifi in the place, no photos allowed, and calls prohibited almost everywhere in the club. Mingling on the other hand will be encouraged, with Maggiora hosting big tables of friends and family in the mould of any gregarious Italian patriarch. Adding to the sense of ease is the lack of dress code, too, Maggiora says – meaning that, so long as you can pull it off, “you’re free to turn up naked,” he laughs. “But do make sure you can pull it off...” This is the spirit of the new Tramp writ large: one part debauchery mixed with two parts discretion. We do not always want Keith Moon to dangle from the chandelier. But we do need the sense that he might.

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