You get a sense of the room before you’ve carried a single flightcase through it. The bronze doors off the entrance hall weigh more than a tonne each, and behind them the Grand Temple opens up like a cathedral built for the 1930s - a mosaic ceiling about sixty feet over your head, stone walls on every side, and a bank of fixed, raked seating running up the far end. For an event the seats vanish: the production company decks a flat floor over the rake, and you end up playing on a temporary stage built across what is normally tiered theatre seating. It is one of the more unusual load-ins in London, and one of the better rooms in the country to play once you’re in.
The Grand Temple at a glance
Freemasons’ Hall is the Grade II* listed Art Deco headquarters of the United Grand Lodge of England, completed in 1933 on Great Queen Street, a two-minute walk from Covent Garden and Holborn. The building hires out ten spaces from 40 up to 1,350 guests, and the Grand Temple is the big one - fixed theatre seating up to 1,350 for a conference or awards ceremony, and around 1,215 for a standing reception or 450 for a seated dinner once a floor is laid over the seats. Moving Venue cater the building in-house, which keeps the dinner-to-dancing pacing under one roof. It draws corporate galas, awards bodies, conference clients and the odd fashion show - the kind of London event that wants the building itself to do half the work.
Building a stage over the seats
The Grand Temple is a hired-in production room, not a house-PA room, and rightly so for its scale. The last time we played it the event company had a full rig in - line arrays flown left and right, a wall of subs, the lot - and we ran our own desks on stage and sent them a clean stereo feed to put through the house system. That split keeps our in-ear mixes and our sound in our hands while the production team own the room. We’re in-ears only, never wedges, which matters more here than in most rooms: a stone-and-mosaic hall this tall is a long, live acoustic, and a stage full of wedges would just feed the reverb. Keeping the stage quiet and letting a properly-tuned PA carry the room is the difference between a wash and a punch.
The practical side is Covent Garden practical - it’s central London, so load-in is timed and the crew vehicles don’t sit on Great Queen Street all day. The stage you play on is the deck the production company builds over the fixed raked seating, so the playing surface and its size are set by the build, not by a permanent stage. Worth knowing if you’re speccing a band: confirm the deck depth early, because a horn line and a keys rig need more front-to-back than a four-piece does.
What size band the room takes
We ran a seven-piece in the Grand Temple - our female-fronted Sisterhood line-up, three lead vocalists out front, female bass and a three-piece band behind. Seven holds the room comfortably for a gala on that scale, but the Grand Temple would happily take more: it’s a big, tall space and a bigger showband with a horn section sits well in it when the budget and the brief want maximum presence. We scale to the event rather than the room - tell us the guest count and the format and we’ll bring the line-up that fills it without overpowering the dinner.
How a gala runs in the Grand Temple
A typical night here is a reception, a seated dinner or an awards ceremony, then the floor. If it’s awards, the presentations run from the staged end with the room seated, and the band comes on once the trophies are done and the floor opens. We play two sets of around an hour, blended together in our own style and built to keep the floor full - a DJ or playlist covering the turnarounds and the back end of the night. The Moving Venue team running the catering means the dinner service and the band’s start time are planned together rather than fighting each other, so the room flips from forks-down to first song without a dead half-hour. In a building this theatrical the band’s job is partly to match the production the rest of the night carries - the lighting, the staging, the scale - and partly just to get a room of corporate guests up out of their seats under that ceiling, which never gets old.
The Brotherhood are South Wales’ go-to corporate band, working London regularly. Check our availability for your awards night, gala or corporate party at Freemasons’ Hall.
