Drapers' Hall

Drapers' Hall stands on ground the Drapers' Company bought from Henry VIII in 1543, the confiscated site of Thomas Cromwell's mansion. The house burned in the Great Fire, was rebuilt by Edward Jarman, burned again in 1772, and took its present form in the 1860s when the surveyor Herbert Williams reworked the frontage and the interiors. What that long accretion produced is one of the last great processional interiors in the City: a Livery Hall ringed with marble columns and full-length royal portraits, under a ceiling painted with scenes from The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The rooms open one upon the other, which is what makes the building work at scale. The Livery Hall seats 276 for a banquet and takes 450 standing; with the reception rooms and the outdoor spaces in use, the Hall holds up to 700 for a standing reception. The Court Room adjoins the Livery Hall directly and is, in the Company's own words, "much in demand for dancing, for which we have a special stage and floor" — a rare thing to find published by a livery company, and the reason this hall reads as a party venue rather than only a banqueting one. The Drawing Room keeps its pale green and cream scheme of the 1860s; the Court Dining Room is the crimson counterweight to it.

Beyond the state rooms there is a walled garden with mulberry trees and a water feature, and a courtyard under 19th-century Portland stone arches, either of which can take a drinks reception before guests move inside. The Company hires the building commercially through its own events team, and its own literature is blunt about the point of the place: Drapers' Hall was designed for entertaining.