Venues in Westminster
Westminster hosts at state-room scale — Whitehall’s banqueting halls, riverside institutions and Grade I interiors built for occasions of record.
A. Wong
Westminster — Chinese Restaurant
Up to 42 guests
Andrew Wong's two-Michelin-starred regional Chinese restaurant near Victoria, with a small counter-and-tables dining room and a darker cocktail bar, the Forbidden City, downstairs.
The Cinnamon Club
Westminster — Indian Restaurant
Up to 300 guests
Westminster's landmark modern Indian restaurant, set in a Grade II-listed Victorian library with a book-lined dining hall and a lower-ground bar built for late drinks and DJs.
Banqueting House
Westminster — Event Space
Up to 450 guests
The last complete room of the Palace of Whitehall, hired exclusively: dinner for 350 beneath Rubens's ceiling, then dancing in James I's vaulted Undercroft.
Church House Westminster
Westminster — Event Space
Up to 550 guests
A Grade II listed events house on Dean's Yard beside Westminster Abbey, built around a circular Assembly Hall under a 30-foot glass dome, with Searcys catering and heritage halls for several hundred guests.
Hotel 41
Westminster — Hotel
Up to 20 guests
A 28-room hideaway opposite the Royal Mews, with a mahogany boardroom and a private Mezzanine reception for up to 20.
Taj 51 Buckingham Gate Suites and Residences
Westminster — Hotel
Up to 300 guests
All-suite Westminster hotel set around a private Victorian-fountain courtyard, with the Michelin-starred Quilon and a full portfolio of event rooms from a domed banqueting suite to intimate private dining.
Corinthia London
Westminster — Hotel
Up to 350 guests
A restored Victorian grande dame off Whitehall, with a landmark ballroom, art-filled private dining and characterful bars for intimate DJ-led nights.
National Liberal Club
Westminster — Members' Club
Up to 200 guests
A Grade II* Waterhouse clubhouse on Whitehall Place, with tiled Victorian state rooms, a 200-capacity function room and the largest private terrace in London above the Thames.
Velvet by Salvatore Calabrese
Westminster — Cocktail Bar
Salvatore Calabrese's jazz-age cocktail and Champagne bar at Corinthia London, all red velvet and rare spirits, open late with live music.
The Rubens at the Palace
Westminster — Hotel
Up to 300 guests
A 161-room Red Carnation hotel opposite Buckingham Palace's Royal Mews, its seven named event rooms and adjoining bbar building running from an intimate boardroom to a 150-capacity suite.
The Guards Bar & Lounge
Westminster — Cocktail Bar
The corner-pavilion bar of Raffles London at The OWO, entered from Horse Guards, with oak panelling, chandeliers and a cocktail list of British and further-flung flavours.
/ About Westminster▾
Westminster is the seat of British government, and has been a centre of power for close to a thousand years. The Palace of Westminster began as a royal residence in the eleventh century — Westminster Hall, raised in 1097, still survives — and became the settled home of Parliament after the court moved to Whitehall in the sixteenth century. Fire destroyed most of the palace in 1834; the Gothic Revival building that replaced it, designed by Charles Barry with A. W. N. Pugin and completed in 1860, gives the riverside its familiar outline and clock tower.
Ceremony is written into the ground here. Westminster Abbey, a Benedictine foundation of the 960s rebuilt in its present Gothic form, has been the coronation church of every English and British monarch since William the Conqueror in 1066, as well as the setting for royal weddings and state funerals. Along Whitehall run the government offices, the Cenotaph and the Banqueting House, the surviving hall of the old royal palace at Whitehall. The district's rooms are correspondingly formal — panelled state interiors, institutional halls and grand hotel spaces built for occasion.
St James's Park — the oldest of the royal parks, enclosed by Henry VIII in 1532 — spreads to the north, its lake and lawns giving Westminster an unexpectedly green heart between the government quarter and the palaces. This is state Westminster rather than the clubland of neighbouring St James's, and the two are easily confused. Westminster and St James's Park Underground stations serve the District, Circle and Jubilee lines, with Victoria terminus a short distance west — one of London's principal gateways for rail and coach.