Mark Masons' Hall, London

You are standing in front of eighty-six Saint James's Street, a site that has been a landmark of social gatherings for over three centuries. Long before it became a center for Masonic activity, this location hosted Williams' Coffee-House in seventeen hundred and two, a fashionable venue where the leading writers and thinkers of the day gathered to debate. By the late eighteenth century, the building had evolved into a private club called Atwood's, which counted the historian and Freemason Edward Gibbon among its prominent members. The original structure stood until seventeen hundred and eighty-five, when a fire destroyed it, leading to a reconstruction that maintained the site's reputation as a place for influential men to congregate and play billiards.