Empty venue season is upon us!

As I’ve mentioned before, I currently work in an office, doing officery thing including running events. The rooms in our office barely hold then amount of people we see, so we tend to use external venues. Now summer is upon us, the venues are touting for new business and keeping their exisiting contacts ‘warm’.

The first jolly I was invited to was at Browns Courtrooms in Covent Garden. Our company must have been there a hundred times and not realised there was anything available for us to use on the top floor. According to their Conference Manager, they’d just had a refurb, to make the rooms more aesthetically pleasing. Even after a few free champanges, the abysmal paint job did not seem to reflect this! Some will say that now I am training as an interior designer, I probably have a more critical eye than most, but my colleague completely agreed with me. Even my husband could do a better job (sorry hubby). Please note, they still give exceptional events services and great food and drink, so just ignore the walls the next time you go to an event at Browns!

The second, far more impressive event was held at ETC Venues in Hatton Garden. We were invited to a preview of the new work by artist Philip Smith called ‘New Horizons’.

The exhbition was half London landscapes (the usual Leicester Square and tube signs etc)

and half Amercian landscapes (gas signs, neon sign in the desert etc).

[caption id=”" align=”alignnone” width=”400″ caption=”Last Chance for Food and Gas by Philip Smith”][/caption]

All were beautiful, but there was nothing particularly ‘new’ about any of these horizons. Still, if you’ve got a few grand spare you can buy the work from http://www.artzu.co.ukand the exhibition is still on at The Hatton.

My colleague and I were acosted by a couple of ETC Venues staff, dying to get more business out of us. Having then been shown their refurb, were were extremly impressed by the spacious, light filled rooms and break out areas available.

We’ll defintely be going back there, not in least because they are the nearest venue to our building, but the food is excellent too!

Last but not least, I won a competition to have free private room hire (plus large quantities of champange, stawberries and a screen for the Wimbledon Female Singles Final) at The Brunelpub in Battersea. There appears to be no obvious link with the famous engineer, nor any customers to speak of…

They have also recently had a refurb and it has been done rather well.

The resulting feeling is very gastropub, although they only seem to serve Thai food (we didn’t stick around long enough to try it). I think the problem is that the pub is situated right next door to the Royal College of  Art (Sculpture department), so this place is clearly inhabited by students during the week, and noone at weekends.

Being a Kentish lady, I found it particularly difficult to get to, as it’s nearest station is Clapham Junction, and I’ve never been there before in my life. Unfortunately, my London friends also had trouble finding the place! Once all arrived though, we were made fairly comfortable and I’d be happy to go and enjoy it’s carefully styled surroundings again in the future.

This entry was posted on 06/07/2009 at 11:14 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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