The Richmond Hotel Liverpool, in the city’s business district and a short stroll from Lime Street station, is independently owned and was converted from the head office for Merseytravel three years ago, though local folk still occasionally pop in to inquire about bus passes. The Grade ll listed building dates back to 1906, and the hotel is part of the Best Western Premier Collection. Continue reading →

Organisers looking for exclusive use of elegant conference rooms in the heart of historical London will want to know about Trinity House, on Tower Hill in EC3 and adjacent to the Tower of London, Tower Bridge and the Thames.

With the atmosphere of a stately country mansion and furniture, paintings and 1790’s decor to match Trinity House is a Grade 1 listed building that is part of England’s maritime history, today operating as the working home of the General Lighthouse Authority as well as the headquarters of the Corporation of Trinity House, a registered charity that provides aids for maritime navigation as well as funding for cadetships and donations to other maritime charities. Past Masters of Trinity House, from its first in 1514, have included Admirals, Vice-Admirals, Captains, Earls, Dukes, Colonels, Barons, Baronets and Viscounts, along with the Rt Hon William Pitt and diarist Samuel Pepys. The current Master is HRH The Princess Royal KC KT GCVO who took the post in 2011 after her father, HRH The Prince Phillip Duke of Edinburgh KG KT OM GBE had held it since 1969, a 42-year tenure making him the longest serving Master. Continue reading →

Also in the area is the Grange City Hotel, located opposite Trinity House in Coopers Row and with many of its 307 guest bedrooms offering views of the historic Tower of London and Tower Bridge, along with the Shard for modern contrast. For those who love their history and archaeology the hotel site also features the largest remaining undamaged piece of London’s Roman Wall, a 30-metre run that was 9 ft thick at the base and 20 ft high when built around AD 200. Today the top half is a section that was added in Medieval times. Continue reading →

Free networking sessions for anyone in the events industry are held by Citizen Event at the Grace Bar and Restaurant, 42, Great Windmill Street, London, W1D 7NB on the last Friday of every month.

There is normally no organised programme but October’s session featured a speaker from health and safety consultants FPL who warned that organisers should always ask themselves how what they have done will sound in court, whether it sounds like enough and how it would look if a barrister read out their company’s profit margins. Continue reading →

Another good exhibition for those wanting to keep up with food trends is Lunch, held at the Business Design Centre, Islington in September and focussing on food to go.

At this year’s presentation we sampled some Up & Go liquid breakfast, made from skimmed milk and oats. Apparently a 330 ml carton of this replaces a bowl of cereal with milk, and though it was pleasant to drink we personally prefer our big breakfast bowl of home-mixed museli with oat clusters for crunchy contrast. It is , however a growing trend for thrusting young types, especially in Australia, to ditch the bowl of traditional cereals in favour of something they can eat or drink whilst driving, perhaps with a mobile phone in the other hand, so who are we to carp? Continue reading →

Those who admire the dramatic and cinematically lit art of the Italian painter Caravaggio can enjoy a current exhibition, Beyond Caravaggio running at the National Gallery, London until January 15 2017. Continue reading →

One of the truly riveting and under-rated political thrillers of the 70’s, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, deals with the reasons why the truth about American involvement in the war in Vietnam was kept from the American public. It features a fictional war hero and renegade USAF General (Burt Lancaster) who breaks out of prison with a small group of convicts to capture an ICBM missile silo he helped design, threatening to fire its nine Titan nuclear missiles at Russia and start WW3 unless the President (Charles Durning) tells the American public the truth, suppressed for years, about why so many had to die. Continue reading →