Petition seeks listed status for historic venue in legal London

The freeholder of The India Club on the Strand wants to redevelop the building into a hotel but the move has led to an outcry from the club’s supporters who point to its history in the Indian independence movement and its use as a meeting place for the country’s diaspora in the 1950s.

Freeholder Marston Properties said these links have been misrepresented and that the building should not be listed; that the club was in fact established in Soho in 1947 and was only housed in the Strand building in the 1960s.

Yagdar Marker, 69, who has run The India Club for two decades, along with his daughter Phiroza, the manager, are leading the campaign to have the building listed.

Ms Marker, 30, said: “When the club opened it was at a time of large scale immigration so it quickly became an important place for those arriving,” she said.

William Gould, a professor of Indian history at Leeds University, said the club was a meeting place for the India League in the run up to independence in 1947.

It also played a role after 1947 as meeting place for people battling colonial violence and repression in places including South Africa and Indonesia.