Saddlers' Hall

Forty Gutter Lane sits a few steps off Cheapside, behind a City frontage that gives no hint of the hall inside. Saddlers' Hall is the livery hall of the Worshipful Company of Saddlers, one of the oldest of the City's guilds, recorded on this site since 1160. The neo-classical building standing today was completed in 1958 to the design of Leo Sylvester Sullivan, replacing a predecessor destroyed in the Blitz; it is the fourth hall to occupy the plot since the Great Fire first levelled its 14th-century original. Period furniture, historical antiquities and portraits of past Masters line the Great Hall, whose stained-glass windows and musicians' gallery give the room its scale.

The Hall is opened for private and business entertaining by permission of the Prime Warden and Court: dinners, receptions, AGMs, weddings and launches among them, with dancing permitted at weddings. Beyond the Great Hall, a run of interconnecting rooms known together as the Front Rooms (the Court Room, the Livery Room and the Wardens' Room) can be combined for a hall-length reception or hired individually for something smaller. Moved to one side, the Wardens' Room doubles as a DJ area for parties. A private courtyard ahead of the Hall itself holds its own outdoor gatherings, its mosaic Company crest set among stone statuary and a fountain.

Searcys caters exclusively; no external kitchen is permitted. The Hall's events team runs weddings, Christmas and summer parties and conferences year-round, alongside the Company's own ceremonial calendar.