Beaumanor Hall is the kind of Victorian country house that looks as though it has always been there, which is rather the point. William Railton, the architect of Nelson’s Column, built it between 1842 and 1848 for the Herrick family in a confident Jacobean style, using Derbyshire stone and spending £37,000 to do it. It is Grade II* listed, it sits in 34 acres of landscaped gardens and courtyards on the edge of Charnwood Forest, and it is only about 5 miles south of Loughborough.
Its best story is a secret one. The estate was requisitioned in 1939 and became a Y Station, one of the listening posts that intercepted enemy Morse traffic and passed it on to Bletchley Park. Operators, many of them women of the ATS, worked the receivers from huts in a field north of the hall disguised as farm buildings, and one of the first confirmations that the Dambusters raid had succeeded came through this site. Leicestershire County Council has looked after the hall since the mid-1970s, and you can still feel that layered history in the panelled rooms and the portraits along the walls.
As a wedding venue it is refreshingly straightforward. The Herrick Suite is the ceremony room, an elegant space seating up to 73, and the grounds are licensed too, so you can marry outdoors beneath the great yew with around 50 guests gathered around you. The Dining Room seats up to 120 for the wedding breakfast with views over the countryside, and a buffet-style reception takes up to 180. Catering is done in house, there is a bridal suite with a view for the morning, and with 180 free parking spaces and the M1 a few minutes away nobody has to think hard about the logistics of getting there.
Where the band plays
The Main Hall is the evening room — the big, handsome space at the centre of the house where the first dance happens and the party settles in. There is generous room for a band, and a hall of this scale gives live music real presence, with plenty of height for the sound to open out. It is worth telling whoever you book that this is a historic interior, so they arrive with a compact rig and a sensible approach to volume rather than a wall of speakers. Load-in from the courtyards is manageable and there is no shortage of parking for a band van.
How the evening runs
The licensed bar runs until 11pm, which gives the night a clear and rather civilised shape: dinner, speeches, the first dance and then a band playing to a full room rather than to the last few stragglers. In practice that usually means two sets rather than three, which is worth agreeing in advance so the running order and the cake-cutting drop neatly into the gaps. Confirm the exact finish time for amplified music with the venue when you book — it is the single most useful thing to know before you brief anybody.
Bands available in Leicestershire and perfectly at home in a venue like this.
More live music in Leicestershire.
- Wedding Bands in Leicestershire
- Events Bands in Leicestershire
- Leicestershire Tribute Acts
- Leicestershire Wedding DJs
- Leicestershire Corporate Entertainment
Worth reading before you book: Sound Limiters Explained. More questions answered on our England & Wales FAQs.