Sex, celebrity and a legacy of unbridled joy: Annabel's at 60

LAST night, Berkeley Square was a symphony of celebrity. The sounds were Champagne corks, the soft thudding of chauffeurs closing doors, the sushi knife swish of camera shutters. W1 was having the biggest birthday anyone could remember: Annabel's, London's grandest - and perhaps greatest-nightclub, was celebrating its 60th.

- 

The club was a diarist's dream: Rod Stewart alongside Emma Weymouth, the Marchioness of Bath; Ricky Martin belting out Livin' la Vida Loca to show Liam Payne and Gene Gallagher how an old pro does it. Bridgerton's Nicola Coughlan at the downstairs bar. Seven-inch heels were de rigueur and even the chic types swapped to vodka Red Bulls to keep them dancing. As 3am approached, Richard and Patricia Caring sidled up to Honey Dijon as she DJ-ed. "You don't invite someone to a birthday and make them buy anything," said Richard, sending another round of drinks into the howling crowd.

How did the club pull it off? "A magician's secrets are never revealed!" says Patricia, who co-chairs The Birley Clubs with husband Richard. "Annabel's is mysterious today as it was 60 years ago." Mysterious, perhaps, but there's never been any doubt Annabel's can pull.

She always could. How did it begin? One apocryphal story has it that founder Mark Birley got his start in 1961 when rogue-about-town and zoo owner John Aspinall, defrauded to the tune of £150,000, needed someone else to fill the basement of his Clermont Club casino at 44 Berkeley Square. Birley obliged and, after having 6,000 tons of coal removed, in 1963 made it happen.

It was a dream he'd harboured since his Eton days, and he named the club Annabel's after his first wife, then styled as Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart (now Lady Annabel Goldsmith). She later reckoned it was "much better than being immortalised as a rose".