It is 10 o’clock on a Thursday night. There’s an autumnal nip in the air, but the pavements in Covent Garden are cluttered with office people supping after-work beers and sucking on fags.

Down in the basement of the Hospital private members’ club, a television studio has been transformed into a banquet hall for the evening. It is packed with names you know, or think you know. There is Sadie Frost, Gavin Turk and the TV executive Elisabeth Murdoch sitting next to The Sun editor, Rebekah Wade. There’s the minutely perfect Thandie Newton, with her arm laced around Mariella Frostrup, who is fresh in from her Q&A with Gordon Brown in Bournemouth. You can almost hear the room groaning under the strain of so many media heavyweights.

The evening is the Hospital Creative Awards, an annual jamboree rewarding the year’s best talent within Britain’s creative industries. The winners – who include Gareth Pugh for fashion, Billie Piper for acting and James Daunt of Daunt Books for publishing – get two prizes: a smart, cut-glass award for the mantelpiece and the honour of mentoring a new player in the same field for a year.

Private members’ clubs never used to be about being kind. They used to be about champagne-quaffing and self-congratulatory back-slapping. But if the Hospital is right, this is the new face of members’ clubs.

The buzz phrase is “club for creative entrepreneurs”, which – try not to cringe – is how the Hospital prefers to be known. We’re talking recording facilities, bars and a busy cultural, social and philanthropic calendar designed to help everyone do business with each other. “The Brits are so shy,” says Will Turner, the Hospital’s CEO whose wife, Emily Oppenheimer, is a member of the South African family with huge interests in the De Beers diamond group. “They need encouragement.” The Hospital aims to provide it.

Turner’s timing is bang on. With Cool Britannia just a faded stain on the collective memory, Britain’s creative industries – film, music, telly, fashion – are going through a not-so-quiet renaissance. There’s a lot of new technology, a lot of young talent – and a lot of corporate money wanting to piggyback that talent into the future.

The Hospital had a slow start. I remember how excited I was when I first heard that the former Eurythmic Dave Stewart was confecting an artistic melting pot in the heart of the West End. Warhol’s Factory casts a long shadow – the fantasy of wildly experimental people hanging out together having paradigm-busting ideas is still sexy. But there were building problems and rumoured tussles with Stewart, who is now in LA, which held back the project from world domination.

This year, though, the Hospital went on the road to Glastonbury and the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, and next week, it is hosting an area at the Frieze Art Fair. Back at home base, it has staged a Warhol v Banksy exhibition and secret gigs with Scissor Sisters and Roisin Murphy – and Radiohead used its facilities to record their last album. The club organises poker nights, film screenings and talks with industry honchos, and throws ice-skating parties and other social events where young creatives in need of funding can bond with older creatives in need of bridging the digital generation gap.

There are plans to “roll out” to Berlin, New York and Shanghai to create a global club of Hospital-affiliated creatives, and it has gone online, building a “walled garden of creativity” so that members and their friends, all of whom must work within the creative industries (definition: “make stuff or help people make stuff”) can read articles by credible heavyweights and scenesters, and contribute blogs. The whole package, for £550 a year, plus a one-off joining fee of £150, is designed to keep its members, who Turner describes as “a restless lot”, endlessly stimulated and feeling like they’re slap-bang in the middle of where it’s at. It will be powerful. It might be fun. Essentially, though, it’s networking – only with trendy people, not suits.

Is this all about harvesting other people’s ideas rather than generating them? Some of today’s most original thoughts are issuing from dives in Hackney and drinking dens in Peckham. Unconventional living leads to happy accidents of imagination. Would coming into a multimillion-pound West End club stimulate or stifle them?

“The phrase ‘creative entrepreneurs’ is slightly toe-curling for the old school,” says Richard Benson, the author and former editor of The Face, referring to a time, not so long ago, when art maintained a barrier between itself and the less free-spirited commercial world. “Artistic people tend to react against anything sold to or set up for them.” Two years ago, he and the ICA artistic director, Ekow Eshun, undertook a project for the “experiential” marketing agency The Fish Can Sing (now renamed Not Actual Size), imagining a Britain whose energies were funnelled exclusively into the creative industries. It was a country where video directors screened their work on plasma screens in the front windows of their homes, people moved house every 18 months to remain inventive and the uninhibited insights of children carried a premium.

“Over the past five years or so, artists and money people have become less socially polarised,” says Benson. “Everyone has realised the benefits of compromising the small stuff to get to the big stuff.”

The Hospital is the only private members’ club in London to formalise a process that happens organically elsewhere. Not for all the strategy meetings in the world could a club CEO have invented what developed at the Groucho Club during the 1990s, when the frisky young stars of Brit Art and Britpop made it their personal den of iniquity. Activities are notably quieter on that stretch of Dean Street these days, but the club still has the air of interesting things happening, and it’s rare not to spot someone famous licking a finger of Bruichladdich in the corner. Soho House takes a similarly laid-back approach.

“We just see ourselves as somewhere to kick back and have fun,” says a club representative. “Sure, we have events to keep our members entertained, but it isn’t our raison d’être. Hopefully, we’re a place where people can come and relax. If they share ideas, brilliant. If they get blind drunk, great too. It’s up to them.”

There’s something to be said for letting it all just happen. The Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane in the East End is exactly the sort of ideas crucible that the Hospital would like to be. A labyrinthine Victorian beer factory, its first event was a rave in 1996. Two weeks ago, at the brewery’s Fashion East (alumni: Marios Schwab, Jonathan Saunders and Gareth Pugh), you would have spotted a slew of fashion-world bigwigs sat alongside a drag queen and someone with piercings pretending to be a nun. They were there to watch, among others, 24-year-old Henry Holland show his designs on his best friend, the It-model Agyness Deyn. Despite the lack of any formal growth strategy, the Truman Brewery has survived on a diet of skill-bartering and mischief-making. The KLF – the dance-music collective who famously burnt £1m – had a party there. The building has hosted the porn awards, Indian weddings and pretty much every kind of behaviour you can imagine. “We’re messy people servicing creative people,” says Lulu Kennedy, the founder of Fashion East, who has been events manager at the Brewery since the beginning.

Now, the corporate world is encroaching on the Brewery: corporate sponsorship is standard, and men in suits are renting space. The future belongs to people with ideas, but today’s ideas people – the likes of Holland, Pugh and the drag queen – are savvier about business than the previous generation. They know their own value.

“Men in suits need creatives more than creatives need them,” says Benson. “I think a huge growth area will be the people who form the bridge between the commercial people and the creative people.”

That’s where the Hospital steps in. It’s a bit slick. It’s lacking some idiosyncrasy, the sort of charming gawkiness that gives rise to small ideas that become big ideas. But what it lacks in magic, it makes up for in state-of-the-art recording studios, online technology and formidable social connections with their digits in all the right pies.

“You sell people your dreams, nowadays,” says Kennedy. “I don’t mind. There are loads of nightmares out there. The world needs good dreams.”

The Hospital, 24 Endell Street, WC2 ; www.thehospital.co.uk

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