Venues in Surrey
The Surrey Hills, Box Hill and the Mole Valley, with Leatherhead and Bagshot: country houses and estates within an hour of central London.
Loseley Park
Surrey — Country House
Up to 180 guests
An Elizabethan manor let whole in 1,400 acres of Surrey parkland, with a panelled Great Hall, a 17th-century Tithe Barn and a walled garden of rooms.
Pennyhill Park
Surrey — Hotel
Up to 300 guests
A 19th-century country-house hotel in 120 acres near Bagshot, with a 45,000 sq ft spa, a chandeliered 280-seat Balmoral Suite and whole-house exclusive use.
Beaverbrook
Surrey — Hotel
Up to 150 guests
Lord Beaverbrook's former Surrey Hills mansion, now a country house hotel with The Orangery, private dining rooms and exclusive hire of its restaurants.
RHS Garden Wisley
Surrey — Event Space
Up to 400 guests
The RHS Glasshouse at Wisley, let privately after the garden closes from June to August, for dinner among tropical plants for 140.
Fairmont Windsor Park
Surrey — Hotel
Up to 500 guests
A rebuilt Jacobean-style house beside Windsor Great Park, with an 801 square metre pillar-free ballroom seating 500 and a panelled Library Club for smaller parties.
/ About Surrey▾
The Surrey Hills was one of the first landscapes in the country to be designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, in 1958, and is now a National Landscape of chalk downs and wooded ridges. Box Hill rises above the River Mole near Dorking. In 1914 Leopold Salomons bought 230 acres of the hill and gave them to the nation, and the memorial his widow opened in 1920 stands near the top, in the care of the National Trust. Across the valley, Polesden Lacey was the country retreat of the Edwardian hostess Margaret Greville, and the future George VI and Queen Elizabeth honeymooned there in 1923.
Surrey’s hire product is the country house close to town, in three forms. Family houses are let whole, with exclusive use of the building, the gardens and a stated number of bedrooms. Estates add parkland and a lawn for a marquee. Country-house hotels sell a private dining room or a function room beside their own kitchen and guest rooms. The choice is privacy against service. Capacity follows the largest room indoors and the grounds outside, so a seated dinner in a house often stops well short of a ballroom figure, and a marquee is how numbers grow.
Surrey sits close to London. South Western Railway runs from London Waterloo to Leatherhead in around 50 minutes, and the last trains back leave at about twenty to midnight, late enough for a dinner to end in time. Bagshot, in Surrey Heath, is about an hour from Waterloo with few direct trains, so guests there are better served by car. The M25 and the A3 bring most of the county within reach by road, and a coach from one central London pick-up keeps a guest list together. A Surrey evening can return the same night.