The Elephant is a 22-bedroom boutique hotel on Church Road in Pangbourne, a Thames-side village west of Reading, and it is a very long way from beige. The interiors are full of handcrafted Indian furniture, oriental rugs and colour, every bedroom individually done and none of them quite like the next, with cosy corners and roaring fires for the half of the year that needs them. The gin bar stocks more than 160 varieties, which tells you most of what you need to know about the spirit of the place.
There is a walled garden behind the hotel, a garden pavilion for outdoor ceremonies, and two restaurants on site, the Herd and Babar, with a kitchen that will turn its hand to anything from a proper three-course wedding breakfast to sharing platters and pizzas out of the garden oven. Dogs are welcome, which matters to more couples than venues tend to admit.
The genuinely useful thing about the Elephant is how differently it can be used. Three licensed spaces — the Elephant Room, the Herd and the Garden Pavilion — take anything from a wedding of two people up to around 140 through the day and more again in the evening. Take the whole hotel exclusively and you have all 22 rooms for your closest friends and family, the gardens, both restaurants and the bar, with nobody else wandering through the middle of it.
Sizing the band to the wedding, not the building
Because the scale of a wedding here varies so much, the same band is not right for every version of it. An intimate afternoon for 30 in one room wants a duo or an acoustic three-piece, something that fills the space warmly without shouting at anyone. Take the whole hotel, fill the Elephant Room for 140 and put a dancefloor in, and a full band with a proper rhythm section is exactly right and will have the room going by the second number. Tell us which day you are planning and we will suggest accordingly — it is the single most useful thing you can say at the start of the conversation.
A village hotel, and how the evening runs
Evenings here run to around midnight, which is plenty for two full sets and a decent late stretch of dancing, and with 22 rooms directly above the party most of the wedding is already home. That is the real reason dancefloors survive the last half hour at hotels like this one.
The venue itself is relaxed about live music, but Pangbourne is a small residential village and a hotel on a church road has neighbours in a way that a farm venue simply does not, so it is worth checking whether any sound restriction applies to your date. If there is one it is easy enough to work with, as long as the band knows about it in advance rather than on the afternoon.
Bands available in Berkshire and perfectly at home in a venue like this.
More live music in Berkshire.
- Berkshire Wedding Bands
- Events Bands in Berkshire
- Tribute Acts in Berkshire
- Berkshire Wedding DJs
- Corporate Entertainment in Berkshire
Worth reading before you book: Sound Limiters Explained. More questions answered on our England & Wales FAQs.