Eight great museum event spaces to host your PR launch

This Monday, 18 May is International Museum Day – an annual celebration highlighting how museums preserve our shared history and remind us that real life has been producing far better plots, drama and characters than anything the streamers have to offer. If you’re hunting for a quirky venue for a client event, team retreat or launch, these nine make a splendid alternative to a hotel ballroom, delivering heaps of history, bags of charm (and if you’re lucky, a gift shop).

Ulster Transport Museum, Belfast

The Northern Irish capital has played an outsized role in transport history, from building the Titanic to manufacturing the ill-fated DeLorean car (you’ll know it from Back to the Future) in the 1980s. It’s all on display at this award-winning museum where highlights include original Titanic design drawings, a stainless-steel DeLorean DMC prototype and an exhibition celebrating Lilian Brand (the first woman to design, build and fly her own aeroplane). The venue hire is as atmospheric as you’d expect, with both the Railway Gallery (up to 500 guests) and the Road Gallery (up to 280) giving guests the chance to hobnob among vintage steam locomotives, trams, buses and cars.

Aerospace Museum, Bristol

Located just outside the city, this is where things get full throttle. Aerospace Bristol charts a century of flight – and the headline act is undoubtedly the late, great Concorde. In the vast Concorde Gallery, guests can dine under the wings of the final one ever built, a sleek, needle-nosed icon of British engineering. With capacity for to 1,000, it accommodates everything from intimate dinners to full-blown spectacles. Big, bold, and literally supersonic.

St Fagans National Museum of History, St Fagans, near Cardiff

The Vulcan pub might not be your typical museum venue hire space but given it’s a faithful recreation of a 1915 boozer, it’s more than earns its place here. Set within the grounds of this much-loved museum just outside Cardiff, it can hold up to 70 guests with catering from the on-site fish and chop ship (there’s a temptingly-named ‘Lock-In’ package too). 

Elsewhere, receptions can also be held at the Atrium (the museum’s main entrance space; 500 guests) in its Modernist & Impressionist art galleries (up to 300) or even in Fagans Castle, where the dining room seats 60. 

But the real pleasure lies outside, exploring St Fagans’ vast open-air collection of reconstructed historic buildings, from 16th century thatched farmhouses and barns to a watermill, school, miners’ cottages and chapel. 

Beamish Museum, County Durham

Complete with costumed characters and working streets, the Beamish recreates life in the north-east across different eras – across an impressive 350 acres. The range of unique spaces include the Bank Board Room overlooking the iconic 1900s Town Street, a Victorian school lesson, a 1900s murder mystery, 1950s mini golf, tram and fairground rides. The capacity for private-hire events is 150 guests. This is less a museum, more a fully functioning time machine.

Little Museum, Dublin

Set in a beautiful 18th century Georgian townhouse overlooking St Stephen’s Green, this compact museum tells Dublin’s story through everyday objects donated by members of the public. Opened in 2011 after a public call-out for artefacts, it houses thousands of objects, charting the city’s social and cultural life. Private tours should only add an extra layer of craic. Maximum capacity: 32 guests.

Provan Hall, Glasgow

One of Glasgow’s oldest buildings, Provan Hall offers a more rustic, atmospheric kind of grandeur, with its stone walls, turret room and a cavernous fireplace in its 16th century dining hall – though it originally dates back to the 1470s and even housed one of Mary Queen of Scots’ Privy Councillors. For larger gatherings (up to 115 guests), a fun marquee can be erected in the gardens. But try not to lose your head.

The Postal Museum, London

Tucked away in Clerkenwell (and appropriately near the Mount Pleasant sorting office), this fascinating window into Britain’s industrial past doubles as a genuinely unusual event space and is available for private tours. Choose between the Courtyard – a beautiful modern outdoor spot (120 standing and 60 seated) with an original red post office phone box – or the Mail Rail, a vaulted-arched, brick-lined cavern beneath the city (275 standing and 150 seated). The real hook: guests can ride London’s century-old underground postal railway, closed for decades and reopened in 2017. Yes, this one certainly delivers.

National Railway Museum, York

One of the largest museums of its kind (and certainly the first National Museum to be built outside of London in 1975), the vast halls of this former locomotive depot contain everything from royal carriages to Mallard, the world’s fastest steam train. The beautifully restored Station Hall (450 seated, 1000 guests standing) has regal grandeur with its royal carriages, and Queen Victoria’s private saloon, while the Great Hall offers serious spectacle on an industrial scale, with 1000 standing and 200 seated. For a gala dinner or an awards night, it’s chuffing perfect.

Have you been to a great event space recently? We’d love to hear about it.

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