Venues in Greenwich
Greenwich is Maritime Greenwich — Wren’s riverside hospital, Thornhill’s Painted Hall and Inigo Jones’s Queen’s House, the first classical building in England.
Old Royal Naval College
Greenwich — Event Space
Up to 550 guests
Wren's riverside masterpiece in Greenwich, with Thornhill's Painted Hall for 550 and a vaulted undercroft below the Chapel built for dancing.
Queen's House
Greenwich — Event Space
Up to 150 guests
Inigo Jones's 1616 villa at the centre of Maritime Greenwich, let privately after hours: a marble Great Hall under a gold-leaf ceiling, and three vaulted chambers below it for the dancing.
/ About Greenwich▾
Maritime Greenwich has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997, and it was inscribed as one composition rather than as a collection of buildings. The Queen’s House is the piece that sets it: Inigo Jones began it in 1616 for Anne of Denmark and it was the first fully classical building raised in England, a white villa on the axis between the river and the park. Everything built afterwards was arranged to keep its view to the water, which is why the naval buildings stand apart in two blocks instead of one.
The Old Royal Naval College fills that frame. Christopher Wren began it in 1696 as the Royal Hospital for Seamen, on the site of the Tudor Palace of Placentia where Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were born. James Thornhill painted the Painted Hall between 1707 and 1726 — forty thousand square feet of ceiling and wall, and the largest painted interior in the country — and it reopened in 2019 after a conservation that took two years. Above them, the Royal Observatory was founded in 1675 as Wren’s first completed building, and the prime meridian runs through its courtyard.
Below the hill sit Cutty Sark in dry dock, the covered Greenwich Market under its 1830s roof, and the National Maritime Museum. Greenwich Park covers 183 acres and is the oldest enclosed royal park in London, walled in 1433. For access, the DLR calls at Cutty Sark, Southeastern runs to Greenwich station, and Uber Boat by Thames Clippers reaches Greenwich Pier from Embankment in a little over twenty minutes — which is the arrival an event here should use.