RSA House, London: Wedding DJ & Entertainment

RSA House sits behind the Strand on John Adam Street, five Georgian townhouses knitted into one building by Robert Adam in the 1770s and home to the Royal Society of Arts ever since. Step through the door and the place is yours for the whole day and into the night.

We’re one of RSA House’s approved and recommended suppliers, and we’ve worked here often enough to know how each room behaves once the evening starts.

The rooms

The Great Room is the one people photograph. A domed glass ceiling, and around the walls James Barry’s painting cycle, which took him twenty-four years. It’s also where Alexander Graham Bell gave the first public demonstration of the telephone, in 1877. RSA licenses it for ceremonies and seats 130 for dinner.

The Benjamin Franklin Room is lighter and squarer, with Adam fireplaces and a Troika chandelier. Licensed for ceremonies up to 100, and it dines around 80.

The Vaults are where the night ends. Four interconnecting brick chambers that stored wine when the Thames still came up to the building, and they hold 220 for a party.

Take the whole house and your guests move down through it as the evening builds, from the Grand Staircase and its 1925 Venetian terrazzo, through the Great Room, and finally underground.

Who brings what

This causes confusion, so plainly. RSA has a house PA and microphones covering the daytime, from your ceremony through to the speeches. That side is looked after.

For the evening we bring our own rig, the PA and the lighting for the DJ setup.

Uplighting is worth a proper look here. Brick vaults take colour better than almost any room we work in, and the difference between an unlit room and a lit one is not a small one. We hire ours out as an addition to the DJ setup, and it is the thing we would most encourage you to see before you decide.

The Vaults have a wooden floor that works perfectly well to dance on. If you want the look of a white LED dance floor down there, we’ve put one in before and we’ll price it with the rest.

The house runs to midnight as standard. Later licences come from RSA, and it’s worth settling early, because it changes how the last hour gets built.

How we work

The day belongs to you, and everything we do follows from that.

You’ll get an online request system for your music, where tracks are marked must play, play if possible, or do not play. You can also build your own list with our playlist builder. There’s a planning sheet, and we speak to RSA the week before to cross-check timings against theirs.

On the night, a wedding DJ who reads the room and stays out of the way. No microphone chatter. Mark has been doing this for over forty years and judges at The Wedding Industry Awards.

Live entertainment

Our entertainment roster covers string quartets, harpists, saxophonists and singers for the daytime, live bands and gospel choirs for the evening, and magicians, caricaturists, dancers and acrobats when you want something your guests won’t have seen before.

A vaulted brick room does something particular to live sound, and plenty of couples here put a band or a saxophonist alongside the decks across the night. That pairing is our DJ Live setup, and we can arrange both together.

Talk to us

Most RSA couples come to us twelve to eighteen months out, though we can often help at shorter notice. Pricing is tailored to your day, so tell us your date and roughly what you have in mind.