Our extremely versatile Arcadian King Edward can cater for champagne receptions, canapés, buffets, formal dinners, discos, bands, casinos and themed events. Licensed to carry upto 120 guests or 150 guests for transfers from your ceremony to reception venues.

Our team has years of experience of ensuring a memorable day and will help you plan and organise this special occasion with a variety of entertainment options, specialist catering, decorations, florists, chocolate fountains and so on.

Please call us on 0800 298 2563
Leah Macleod
Events Manager
King Cruises Ltd
020 8303 0774
www.kingcruises.com

Type of event – is the meeting of a sensitive nature? Do you require exclusive hire of a venue? Do you need a specific conference venue or would you prefer something more unusual and unique? Do you wish to bring a more creative angle in and use different spaces for different activities?
Rooms – how many rooms will you require? A main meeting room with breakouts for smaller groups?
Catering – do you need breakfast on arrival for your delegates, what sort of lunch would you prefer? A sandwich lunch in a foyer area, a fork buffet or perhaps a seated lunch.

Timings – what time do you need set-up from – when will the delegates arrive?

Venue – with so many interesting and exciting venues coming onto the conference market, it can be difficult to stay in touch with all of the latest venues available. For each potential venue you need to be able to assess quickly and easily how appropriate they are for your particular needs. The simplest way to find the perfect venue for each meeting and conference is to speak to our team of experienced conference organisers who will help you along each step of the way.

Sound plays several different roles in the venue and the requirements of sound system vary with each event.

The reinforcement system comprises microphones, a mixer, amplifiers and speakers with most systems having in-line signal processing that is located between the mixer and the amplifier.
The playback system is used to create music and effects during a production.
CD players, hard drives, ipods are used to create music and effects during and event, whereby as opening for the event or closing or during intermission or comfort breaks.

Thy system may also need additional processing or control equipment and requires speakers of different types and voltages in different locations from those best suited for reinforcement.

The recording system adds input sources such as mp3 recorders, direct to CD recorders and Computer Drives. In addition specialised remote recording and live broadcoasting equipment is also used.

The type of microphones used for recording will differ from from those of the reinforcement system and there is less need for multiple amplifiers and speakers.

Ultimately the most effective PA systems for events are systems that are equally distributed, thus creating a balanced system in the entire venue, not sound that is too loud in the front and much softer at the back. Balanced systems will require multiple amplifiers and speakers. The speakers would have to be flown from underneath the ceiling and distributed equally along the walls. This system will require and expert technician to ensure that only one sound is heard and n0t multiples sounds, this requires various digital delay equipment. Even though many systems claim to be automated and expert engineer is still required to fine tune the system. It is a complex system and professional companies are required to ensure the delegates or guests have a good listening experience and the message is put forward effectively.

Completed in 1832, the Law Society’s hall has been at the centre of the legal world ever since. This stunning neo-Georgian building lends itself perfectly to both corporate and private events that require gravitas and style. Contact

The Six Clerks Restaurant & Bar combines a traditional 19th century space with modern furnishings and colours to stunning effect. The calm and relaxing surroundings are perfect for business or pleasure. Contact

Our resident chef, Leon Secretan, sources predominately British produce for a delectable seasonal menu with fortnightly specials, complemented by an extensive wine list.Contact

This beautiful, ornate building is Grade II listed, with plenty of history and character for a lasting impression.Contact

The Reading Room is perfect for a civil ceremony of up to 150 guests followed by drinks in the traditional surroundings of the Old Council Chamber or the stylish and modern Six Clerks Restaurant & Bar.

Then make your way to the grand Common Room via the elegant staircase for the wedding breakfast and dancing.

The Law Society
113 Chancery Lane
London
WC2A 1PL

Nearest stations:
Chancery Lane

Function Rooms
Six Clerks Room
Seat Capacity: 12-40
Party Capacity: 50

Reading Room
Seat Capacity: 60-220
Party Capacity: 230

Old Book Shop
Seat Capacity: 12-40
Party Capacity: 50

Common Room
Seat Capacity: 60-280
Party Capacity: 280

Strand
Seat Capacity: 16-40
Party Capacity: 50

Fleet
Seat Capacity: 16-40
Party Capacity: 50

Council Chamber, Holborn and Lincoln
Seat Capacity: 50-100
Party Capacity: 120

Old Council Chamber and Dining Room
Seat Capacity: 25-130
Party Capacity: 140

Common Room, Strand, Fleet and Bell
Seat Capacity: 100-370
Party Capacity: 380

Venue Facilities
Air Conditioning
Civil Ceremonies
Cloakroom
Cocktails
Dance Floor
Dining
Disabled Access
Disabled Facilities
Extensive Wine List
Plasma Screens
Private Functions
Wi-Fi

The Royal Opera House is as unique a venue for a special event as it is for artistic performances. Whether it be a corporate drinks reception for 1000 guests, a product launch for 200 or a private dinner for four, this event space is extraordinarily diverse. It is without doubt one of the most distinctive and highly individual settings in the heart of London. Offering both traditional grandeur and cool, contemporary elegance we have a dedicated events team and bespoke catering on hand to ensure your event is a memorable success . Contact

Once the Covent Garden fruit and flower market, The Paul Hamlyn Hall is now a spectular event space with dramatic architechtural appeal. Flooded by light for lunches and conferences or spotlight after dark for spectular receptions and dinners, the Paul Hamlyn Hall really is a flexible and oustanding venue for any event. Contact

Royal Opera House
Covent Garden
London
WC2E 9DD
Contact

Nearest stations:
Covent Garden

Function Rooms
Paul Hamlyn Hall
Seat Capacity: 100-650
Party Capacity: 1000

Linbury Studio Theatre
Seat Capacity: 100-200
Party Capacity: 240

Trust Dining Rooms
Seat Capacity: 4-20
Party Capacity: n/a

Venue Facilities
Air Conditioning
Cloakroom
Cocktails
Dance Floor
Dining
Disabled Access
Disabled Facilities
Extensive Wine List
Music System
Plasma Screens
Private Functions
Wi-Fi

Function Rooms
The Penthouse
Seat Capacity: 12-18
Party Capacity: 25

Eden
Seat Capacity: 20
Party Capacity: 25

Cellar Room
Seat Capacity: 4-30
Party Capacity: 30

The Cinema
Seat Capacity: 30
Party Capacity: n/a

The Library
Seat Capacity: 4-30
Party Capacity: 30

Cerise Restaurant
Seat Capacity: 100
Party Capacity: 100

Venue Facilities
Air Conditioning
Civil Ceremonies
Cloakroom
Cocktails
Dance Floor
Designer Stationery
Dining
Disabled Access
Disabled Facilities
Extensive Wine List
Garden/Patio
Luxurious Accommodation
Music System
PA System
Parking
Plasma Screens
Private Functions
Wi-Fi

Sexy hotels like throwing sexy parties! We know all the ingredients to throw you a lavishly memorable event that your guests will be talking about for a long time. From dinner and dancing in Cerise Restaurant, to a funky party in The Penthouse, or perhaps a more leisurely afternoon tea in the Library, we can offer and tailor it all. We can even show a video footage or a slide show to your friends in our Cinema Room.
For large events, the hire of the Cerise restaurant for up to 100 guests makes a stunning venue. With your own private entrance and taking over the whole of the basement floor, you can party with dinner and dancing with an outside area in real style.
Our dedicated party planners ensure that whether it’s a lunch for four, dinner for 35 or a drinks reception for 80, the event will be organised with total panache, zeal and professionalism.

The Penthouse is the perfect place for private business meetings, as a contemporary space to entertain in or simply as the ultimate apartment for luxurious living. Full length glass windows provide spectacular views across the city skyline with generous balconies. With its own sauna, Bang and Olufsen sound and visual system and luxurious interior, The Penthouse is the ultimate place to meet in Reading.
With as much or as little service as is required, The Penthouse affords total privacy or the full works – our chef can even prepare your food in the privacy of a fully-equipped kitchen

Gibson Hall, located in the heart of the City of London has an impeccable reputation as one of the finest banqueting and conference venues in London. This was recently recognised as a winner of the Corporate Hospitality and Events Association’s Award of Venue of the Year. The Hall was completed in 1865 and was designed by architect John Gibson for the National Provincial Bank of England. Gibson Hall was the greatest of the City’s banking halls and portrays the classical Victorian elegance prevalent at the time. Contact

The venue now incorporates many of the facilities required for modern event management and the flexibility of the hall and smaller break out rooms allows clients the freedom to create truly memorable occasions. Contact

Function Rooms
Christmas Party 2009
Seat Capacity: 150-300
Party Capacity: 150-500

Venue Facilities
Air Conditioning
Cloakroom
Cocktails
Dance Floor
Dining
Disabled Access
DJ Decks
Garden/Patio
Late Licence
Music System
PA System
Private Functions
Security

Like the innovations in venues form, many new venues contain either variations of the conventional shape or are completely different in form, while a few convention venues are completely different in form, while a few try to combine the blank canvas and the conventional type of venue where the form and shape is already predetermined.

Many Conference and Convention Venues in London are primarily designed for multi purpose use. Prompted by the desire to bring the audience closer to the speaker and to enable more interaction within the delgates, the variotions either partially or completely surround the area of focus with seating areas.  The trend toward thrust and arena venues presents many different challenges to the event manager and venue designer.

THE O2 Arena in London has been named the top arena in the world at the Billboard Awards. The awards honour the music industry’s top artists, professionals and venues based on the Billboard Boxscores chart. This is the first time the North Greenwich landmark has won this award, taking the accolade from Madison Square Gardens in New York which has won for the past five years.

The award follows the London venue being crowned the world’s most popular arena just a fortnight ago by Pollstar, which showed The O2 had sold nearly 1,600,000 tickets so far this year. On receiving the reward, Chief Executive and President of AEG Europe David Campbell said: “Thank you to the entire AEG family for helping create the world’s most popular music venue in London. “The O2 has generated more than 2,500 jobs in London and this award is for those people. “We are a bit biased but we think The O2 is a very special place, and we particularly want to thank the 600 artists who have played since we opened just over two years ago. “In otherwise difficult times it’s great that music, and particularly live music, can make a positive difference to so many people.”

David Campbell is talking about the O2 Arena when he calls it “The Dome”. He moves to correct himself, but hesitates. “Actually,” he says, “after all this time I think we can go back and talk about The Dome now. There was a silly period when no one would talk about it at all. Then there was a period when it was only ‘The O2’, we couldn’t say ‘The Dome’. Now it’s called the tent.”

It has been called a white elephant, too, and an £800 million flop, but the Government’s once-maligned Millennium Dome has, finally, after years of growing pains, come of age.

The O2 Arena is one of Britain’s best-known venues and arguably the world’s most popular, having sold almost four times the number of tickets of New York’s iconic Madison Square Garden last month. Audiences have been drawn by live acts as varied as Coldplay and Bon Jovi, the rock bands, to Andrea Bocelli, the tenor, and Michael McIntyre, the comedian.

But for Mr Campbell, the O2’s chief executive, the success story can be greater still. “We’re trying to get into more and more different areas,” he said. “The key to making a building like this work, and making money out of it, is being highly flexible — you’ve got to be able to adapt for everything.”

That means, inevitably, the Olympic Games, looming ever larger, in 2012. The Olympic Park may be going up in Stratford, on the other side of the Thames, but the gymnastics and basketball events will be staged in Mr Campbell’s tent. Moreover, AEG Europe, the owner of the Arena, has an ambitious programme of expansion being embarked upon in the lead-up to the Games. There are plans for a “first-class” hotel on the site, providing what would be the capital’s largest conference and banquet area. There is a foray into opera next May, with the O2 set to stage three performances of Carmen.

There are plans for further “spectaculars” of the ilk of this year’s Ben Hur and Star Wars and the hope of launching more original productions that then can tour internationally. And more live sport, to follow the forthcoming ATP World Tour Finals. Mr Campbell hopes that eventually the venue will host an NBA basketball team, a London equivalent of the New York Knicks, Chicago Bulls and LA Lakers.

“We already host one game a year but our next stage is to try and get regular season NBA games here [much like the NFL at Wembley], before then getting all the way to having a permanent team. If you think about it, the distance between East and West Coast America isn’t as different as the distance between London and New York.”

The O2 is still suffering its setbacks, albeit no longer self-inflicted. Summer 2009 was supposed to the season of Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, starting out on the comeback trail from a certain corner of South East London. As it is, Mr Campbell is sincere when he describes Jackson’s death, which occurred only two weeks before the singer was set to begin a 50-date tour, as a “tragic loss”, but he points out, too, that the O2 Arena is far from crumbling as a result.

“We did 140 event days last year. This year we’ll have 177. That’s a 25 per cent increase year-on-year — and that’s without Michael Jackson. He would have hit it out of the ballpark.” But it was a “bit of a lonely summer”: only three of Jackson’s first 27 dates could be filled. Prospects are better for the final 23 dates, which begin in January: “We’ll fill the majority of those, they’re easier because its seven or eight months away.”

Mr Campbell prefers to look forward and a 450-room hotel is foremost in his mind. AEG hopes to gain final planning permission by the spring and have it built in time for the Olympics.

“At the moment, we are a great generator of bed nights for all the other hotels in this immediate vicinity and up and down the Thames. We’re not benefiting financially out of it and we’d quite like to. “The tent, or The Dome, is such an iconic structure. It’s on the opening title of the X Factor. It gives us a great opportunity with a hotel. It will be a flagship.”

Another key preoccupation is to highlight the importance of the O2 Arena, along with other entertainment venues, as a driver of the capital’s economy. Mr Campbell is clearly frustrated that the Labour Government and Boris Johnson, the capital’s Conservative Mayor, “don’t have a real sense of our economic value … People travel here and they stay — they spend money in shops in London, they spend money on hotels in London, they spend on restaurants in London, on transport.

“That’s a lobbying message to try and get forward in the next six months. I don’t think there’s an appreciation of that.”

He wants more support from the political arena. The O2 recently hosted the world gymnastics championships, but Mr Campbell said that he was “disappointed” that he received little promotion from the Olympics’ organising committee or from City Hall.

“That is the first Olympic sport in an Olympic venue, in London preOlympics. That’s just a complete missed opportunity.” It is not the kind of mistake that Mr Campbell intends to allow to be made again.

The paths leading to a career designing in the theatre are numerous and varies. They may come from within the theatre itself or from the outside world. An actor or director gifter with a visual sense of theatre can contribute to design just as surely as can the trained visual artist who, equipped with the practical ability to draw and paint, possesses a strong desire to be in the theatre. A student from the latter background standing on the threshold of training for a career in design for the theatre may puzzle over what the future holds. The sudden transition flush of excitement involving one’s first commitment to hard work. Anyone interested in achieving creative and personal fulfillment as a scene, costume or lighting designer must first thoroughly understand the complexity of theatre as an art form.