The Foundling Museum

The Foundling Museum occupies a 1930s building on Brunswick Square that safeguards the interiors of London's original Foundling Hospital, the children's home Thomas Coram established in 1739. Two historic rooms were lifted from the demolished hospital and reinstated here: the Court Room, with a Rococo plaster ceiling, marble chimneypiece and eighteenth-century paintings, and the Picture Gallery, hung with full-length portraits and lit by tall sash windows over the square. The collection runs from Hogarth, a founding governor, to the Gerald Coke Handel material, a reminder that the hospital was among Britain's first public art galleries.

For private events the museum hires these rooms after hours. The Picture Gallery seats around a hundred for dinner beneath the portraits, while the green-walled Court Room suits smaller dinners and receptions in its Georgian setting. Two contemporary spaces, the Clore Creative Studio and the Study Studio, take meetings, workshops and daytime sessions. The whole museum can be taken for an evening, opening the galleries for drinks and canapes among the works.

Catering, bar, florals and technical production run through the museum's own list of approved suppliers, who build each event to the room; late licences are available on request. Fifteen minutes from King's Cross and Euston, it is a Bloomsbury address that trades marble and portraiture for the usual event-space blank canvas.