Trinity House

Trinity House stands on Tower Hill, its Portland stone front looking directly across Trinity Square Gardens to the Tower of London. Samuel Wyatt designed the building in 1796 as the new headquarters of the Corporation of Trinity House, the maritime charity and General Lighthouse Authority that still occupies it today. Incendiary bombs gutted the interior in December 1940; Albert Richardson rebuilt it from Country Life's 1919 photographs, and Queen Elizabeth II reopened the House on Trafalgar Day, 21 October 1953. The bell of the Royal Yacht Britannia, which Trinity House presented to the Queen that same day, was returned when the yacht was decommissioned in 1997 and now hangs beneath the Quarterdeck's eighteenth-century paintings, reached by a twin-curved Wyatt staircase rising from an entrance hall of ship models and lighthouse maquettes.

Five rooms are hired together, exclusively, so the House becomes the client's alone for the day. The Library is the largest, an oval room beneath a minstrel's gallery built to hold a chamber orchestra, its stained glass and silver collection facing the Tower and the river; it seats 130 for dinner or takes 180 standing. The Court Room stands on the second-largest single-loom carpet in the British Isles, woven with the Corporation's own arms, under a ceiling painted by J F Rigaud and restored by Holman Hunt. The Pepys Room, named for the diarist and former Master of the House, adjoins the Library and doubles as its dance floor for wedding receptions; the Luncheon Room and Reading Room, hung with portraits of former Masters, complete the run of five.

An in-house events team has staged functions here since 1994, working to the client's own choice of caterer rather than a single house kitchen. The same exclusive-use terms run from a ten-person board meeting in the Reading Room to a 130-seat banquet in the Library.