There and Back in a Day: A Yorkshire Guide to Holding an Event in London

Sooner or later most growing Yorkshire businesses end up hosting something in London. The clients are there, or the investors, or the trade press, or simply the half of the industry that will not travel north for a Tuesday evening. The event itself is rarely the hard part. The hard part is everything around it: forty staff on a train, a van of kit on the M1, a block of hotel rooms, and two days out of the diary for something that lasts four hours.

It doesn’t have to work like that. Planned around the railway rather than around a venue brochure, a London event can be run from Leeds, York or Doncaster in a single day, with the team home the same night.

Start with the station, not the postcode

Every direct train from Yorkshire to London arrives at the same place. London King’s Cross is the terminus for LNER services from Leeds, York, Doncaster and Wakefield, for Hull Trains, and for Grand Central from Bradford. York is under two hours away on the fastest services, Doncaster about an hour and a half, and Leeds a little over two.

That makes the first planning decision simple, and it is the one most often got wrong. A venue on the other side of London adds a Tube journey or a taxi at each end of the day. For one person with a laptop that is a minor nuisance. For a team carrying banners, samples and a box of name badges, it is where the day starts to come apart. Somebody gets separated on the Underground, the taxi with the display stands sits in traffic on Euston Road, and the set-up hour you planned becomes twenty minutes.

Choose a venue you can walk to from the platform and all of that disappears. Your team arrives together, on time, and the last thing they do before the train home is stroll back to the station.

It works for your guests too

The same logic applies to the people you are inviting. Kings Cross St Pancras is served by six Underground lines, so it is a single train from most of central London, the City and the West End. Thameslink runs through St Pancras next door, and so does Eurostar, which matters if any of your clients are coming from Paris or Brussels.

Anyone who remembers Kings Cross from twenty or thirty years ago may need persuading. The area behind the stations has been rebuilt over the last two decades and is now one of the smarter parts of central London, full of restaurants, offices and public squares. Guests no longer think of it as somewhere to hurry through.

Look for a room that comes with everything

The second big saving is the van. Yorkshire firms often assume they need to bring their own screens, sound and staging, because that is how it works in a hotel function room at home. Most serious London venues are set up differently, with production and catering built in, and using it is almost always easier than driving your own down.

One example sits a few minutes’ walk from the platforms. Town Hall’s event spaces are inside the 1937 Camden Town Hall building on Bidborough Street, operated by Bottaccio. The main room, Vision Hall, has 13-metre ceilings and interiors by Tom Dixon. The audio-visual system is installed, broadcast-ready and run from one control position, and the catering is handled by Rhubarb. It is a building with some musical history as well: The Verve played there in 1992.

Wherever you book, ask the same questions early. What production equipment is included? Who operates it on the day? Is furniture part of the hire? Can deliveries arrive the day before? The more the venue provides, the less you need to move down the country, and the fewer of your own people spend the event behind a mixing desk instead of talking to clients.

Build the day backwards from the last train

Once the venue is fixed, plan the timings from the end rather than the beginning.

• Check the last direct train home before you set the finish time, and aim to close the formal part of the event at least ninety minutes before it leaves.
• Book the team’s travel as a group and as early as you can. Advance fares on the East Coast route are released weeks ahead, and seats together are much easier to find then.
• Put the team on a train that arrives two to three hours before doors open. That is enough time to walk over, set up, eat something and deal with whatever has gone wrong.
• Consider a late afternoon start. A four o’clock to eight o’clock event suits London guests, who can come straight from work, and still gets a Leeds or York team home before midnight.
• Send one person down the night before if the set-up is complicated. It costs one hotel room, not forty.

Make the most of being there

A day in London is expensive in time even when it runs smoothly, so get more than one thing out of it. Book client meetings near the venue for the morning. Invite the prospects you have only ever met on video. Ask your London customers to bring a colleague. If a journalist or an industry body is based nearby, offer them ten minutes with your managing director before doors open.

The businesses that do this well treat the event as the anchor for a day of work in the capital, not as the only reason for the trip. With the venue a short walk from the train, there is time for all of it, and everyone still sleeps in their own bed.