Case study: Benefactors Dinner 2024

By Ella Shepherd, Assistant Catering and Events Operations Manager

Imperial College London is learning to ‘Love our Buildings’ in a pilot towards a more sustainable way of working, and the Catering and Events team have shown us how they love their spaces by transforming not so exciting rooms into stunning, desirable event spaces with lighting and decor. I sat down with Alex Dexter-Mills (Events technical manager) who utilises his knowledge and skill set to visually renovate our event rooms with Audio Visual (AV) tools. This allows the use of spaces that otherwise wouldn’t be considered. By opening these spaces up to more opportunities, they are essentially being ‘up-cycled’, therefore aligning with the major sustainability goals of the university and going hand in hand with the ‘Love Our Buildings’ project. 

Recently, the Catering and Events team hosted the Benefactors Dinner in the Great Hall on our South Kensington campus. The event itself was about the Lunar Mission which was perfectly accompanied by ‘The Moons Symphony’, a performance that carries the attendees on a ‘musical voyage through our galaxy’. This venue is the single largest event space we offer with a maximum capacity of 732, usually reserved for large conferences, lectures and exhibitions as the tiered stage and seating enables seamless viewing and can also be retracted for a flat floor space. For this particular event however, the team transformed the Great Hall into an intimate dinner setting for approximately 60 guests, as well as, guest speakers and an orchestra performance.  

A key objective for this event was to make the dinner feel like it belonged in this substantial space and not as if it were lost in its surroundings. The team achieved this by illuminating various aspects of the room whilst keeping others shadowed, the illusion of a smaller space was created successfully without the area feeling dull or gloomy. The goal for the team was to compliment both the dinner and orchestral performance whilst simultaneously keeping them in two segmented areas, this was done fantastically with diverse types of lighting positioned in the space.  I spoke to Alex, who explained that he ‘worked on how the AV can supplement the culinary delights without being overly distracting’, and to keep in theme with Loving our buildings, Alex detailed how the team chose to utilise the spaces wooden aspect to reflect the space colours, rather than trying to hide this feature. Alex described how he ‘deployed LED tubes as they can provide light and give some great looking textures and aid the delivery of the theme Luna’, by accompanying the space with extraordinary lighting, it presented a transformed look without major modifications, and explained that this approach ‘changes opinions of our spaces and re-enlightens ideas and concepts for their uses’ and by doing so, helps the effort towards Loving our Buildings. The Technical Events team worked around the many obstacles that are offered by the Great Hall, such as operating safely whilst using metres of cables as well as ensuring the look of the space was not compromised. When asked what the main challenges were to execute this, Alex explained ‘Being in the Great Hall – you have no idea how much extra equipment and cables we order to be able to pull off our ambitious plan in this space. The key is lots of planning to work out our cable routes, equipment locations.’. A fantastic job was done by the team, who pulled of a phenomenal event whilst showcasing their ability to adapt to various spaces and increase their appeal. 

I asked Alex what further plans he had to enable this kind of event to become more accessible, he explained how they are ‘purchasing more affordable lights to liven up our spaces on campus’ and that there are a range of options from ‘budget friendly, simple but stylish uplighters, through to custom packages which we tailor specifically to each event’. Alex’s team is keen to support the Imperial mission ‘From large events (such as strategy launch & centre openings) right through to focusing on the departmental and team level events’. With the help of our AV packages, the possibilities of our Imperial spaces are endless. To find out how the Imperial Venues team can support your next event, visit our audio-visual services or get in touch with the team.

*Originally published on 8 August 2024 on Imperial’s Events and Hospitality website