Cutlers' Hall

Cutlers' Hall stands on Warwick Lane, close to St Paul's, home to the Worshipful Company of Cutlers since a House of the Cutlers was first recorded nearby in 1285. This is the Company's fifth hall on the site: the fourth, rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666, was compulsorily purchased by the Metropolitan and District Railway in 1882, and the present building, designed by the Company's Surveyor T. Tayler Smith, opened on 7 March 1888. It survived the 29 December 1940 firebomb raid that levelled the surrounding streets, though a 1941 high-explosive bomb took out the north wall; the damage was repaired by 1951. The red-brick and pink-sandstone facade carries a terracotta frieze of cutlers at their craft by the Sheffield sculptor Benjamin Creswick, a pupil of Ruskin, and is Grade II listed.

The Livery Hall is the principal room, its Victorian hammer beam roof hung with a Barge Banner carried in the Lord Mayor's procession of 1763 and painted shields from the processions of 1834 and 1984, both years a Cutler held the office. The Master's chair sits beneath a carved wooden canopy topped with the Stuart Royal Arms, believed to date from around 1670 and carved by a contemporary of Grinling Gibbons. Downstairs, the ground-floor Court Room holds portraits of Company members who served as Lord Mayor and an oak coat of arms dated 1569, one of the few pieces to survive the Great Fire; its stained-glass stairway windows carry the arms of past Masters back to 1665.

Private hire runs through the Company's own events office for corporate dinners, formal banquets, receptions and weddings, with external catering not permitted.