Room Hire
Hospitality with History in the heart of Barnard Castle
Located right in the centre of Barnard Castle, the Witham could be the perfect venue for your next event. With flexible indoor and outdoor space for between a handful and 250 people, our building is a great place to host meetings, workshops, celebrations and all kinds of events.
To discuss renting one or more of our spaces, please contact us on [email protected] or call 01833 631107. If you have to leave a message on the answerphone, somebody will call you back as soon as we’re open. Please click on the photographs below if you would like to see a more detailed specification for each room.
The Witham is a charity so any income from your event will directly support Barnard Castle’s Community Arts Centre.
The Witham Room
This lovely room has high ceilings and lots of natural light. Overlooking the town, and accessible by stairs or a lift, it is a great space for small numbers up to a maximum of 60 people. In the past year, it’s been used for all-day meetings, a public consultation, dance and fitness workshops, a birthday lunch, a christening party, a Jubilee party and a funeral tea, as well as the weekly youth theatre and various small performances and talks.
Whatever you’re planning, we’ll bend over backwards to make this room work for you.
Gallery
You can hire the gallery to exhibit your work, or – depending on the exhibition schedule – you could seek to use it as a sophisticated space in which to entertain your clients after hours.
The County Room
This flexible and airy room is ideal for smaller meetings and spoken word events such as lectures. It’s regularly used for group sessions, and weekly creative workshops. Theres a discretely positioned sink with hot and cold water, so you can wash away paint if you’re running something artistic. If you want to be able to brew up when you have a quiet moment, we can arrange a kettle, or refreshments from the café.
Victorian Music Hall
This spacious heritage room can be set up in a variety of different ways. We can slide the raked seating away and use the whole area for, say, an indoor market during the day. Or we can close the acoustic curtains on three sides to make it cosy and create a more intimate feel for between about 50 and 150 people, we can dress up the tables and add some great lighting. All this, and you’ll still have room for a dance floor.
We can help you source a live band or a DJ or we’ll help you plug a USB copy of your favourite playlist into our kit. If you want to bring in outside caterers we can connect you to people who know our venue and have delivered a quality yet competitively priced food offering for other customers in the past. Depending on what you’re looking for on the food front, we may be able to handle that for you too if your event takes place when our café is closed to the public. If you want children’s entertainment, we can help you sort that out too. Punch and Judy show anyone?
Don’t forget that we can run a great cash bar from our adjacent café too.
The Garden and Terrace
Our charming, often sunny walled garden can be hired if you want to bring in your own marquee, or if you want to have a celebration that flows from the inside to the outside, it can be added onto an exclusive booking for the café or the music hall.
Café Bar
Depending on how much notice you can give us and what else is already booked into the building, you can also hire our café bar for your exclusive use.
Our opening hours are shown at the front of the website, however if you’d rather come in and talk to us outside our normal opening times, we’ll do our best to make something work to suit your availability. Every package we put together is bespoke so we can make sure that it properly suits your requirements.
Please email us on [email protected] to arrange a look round and a chat – or to book a room.