London's South Bank gets green event makeover

It was the bins that gave it away – those and the suspiciously heavy bright orange cushions.

Apart from that there was nothing to distinguish 15Hatfields, the new environmentally sustainable events venue on London's South Bank, from any other medium sized conference centre – and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Everything is all straight lines, smooth pastels, unobtrusive lighting, moving walls, forgettable furniture and the latest in audio visual equipment for all those endless power point presentations. It's just the bins, each of which has a different section for paper, glass, cans and other waste, that hints that this is being positioned as an ideal event for green venues.

Escorting me round the new 270 person capacity venue, client services manager Warren Campbell explains that the décor was part of a conscious decision to embed rather than flaunt the site's environmental credentials. "People coming in expect to see that a green venue means you have to compromise on style and quality," he says. "But we wanted to prove that is not the case."

Instead, 15Hatfields has tried to keep everything as close as possible to the tried-and-tested design principles for operating a successful events venue. Just like the lesson Property Ladder's Sarah Beeny offers all those hapless developers who insist on painting their houses bright pink, all conference centres should look pretty much the same, on the grounds that making a venue as flexible and neutral as possible allows firms to quickly put their own stamp on the space for any given event.

And yet, while 15Hatfields may look pretty generic, as soon as you scratch beneath the surface you find it is anything but.

Campbell claims that as soon as the decision to refurbish the ground floor of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health's offices in Southwark as a conference centre was taken the highest environmental standards were adhered to. Consequently, not only are all the lights and electrical equipment the most energy efficient models available, the carpets are made from natural goat hair, the furniture is made from recycled wood, the chip board in the walls comes from decommissioned power stations the bottled water is filled from a filtration system in the kitchen, all the food and beverages comes from an organic caterer round the corner, and the bar that greets visitors is made from recycled Lenor bottles.

This sustainable sourcing strategy came at a cost, according to Campbell. " We could have got the glass we used from Poland for half the price, but we decided to go with a local manufacturer to cut down on emissions from shipping, " he explains. "Where ever possible we have gone with local suppliers, so instead of going overseas to source our china, we commissioned a company in Sheffield to make it."

This approach added between 20 and 25 per cent to the refurbishment bill, according to Campbell, pushing the total costs to around £800,000.

However, early indications are that the investment will pay off. The venue is in the first tranche of locations to attain the new BS 8901 standard for environmentally sustainable events and just two weeks after its opening the venue has almost £80,000 in bookings and boasts a 75 per cent occupancy rate between now and December.

Andrew Hamadanian, corporate communications manager for 15Hatfields, argues that the venues green credentials are resonating with event managers under growing pressure to ensure their events meet high environmental standards. "The problem is there are so many organisations making green claims that it makes it very difficult for event managers to work out who to believe," he says. "What we have aimed to do is allow them to effectively outsource that problem as we have our own internal policy department that vets our suppliers' claims, carries out site visit, requires documentary evidence, and checks their suppliers' suppliers and so on."

It is a pretty compelling value proposition for those many events managers who end up so disoriented by suppliers' various green claims that they just end up ordering some recycled paper and organic canapés and giving up.

Oh, and the bright orange cushion. It was made from recycled seat belts and looked right at home sitting on the sofa in the reception opposite the bamboo monitor.

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