Togather x Village Underground and EartH: our interview with Alice Pemberton

Togather has exclusively partnered with London-based venues Village Underground and EartH to offer their clients unparalleled access to over 2,000 of the best caterers in the country.

In this interview we speak to Alice Pemberton, Head of Commercial Sales at the venues about why a range of catering options is so important for clients picking venues, her excitement around the partnership and why Village Underground and EartH are such incredible places to throw events.

Hi Alice, we hope you're doing really well! So can you talk to us about why you believe a wide choice of catering is so important to Village Underground and EartH's clients?

Hi there!

Fundamentally, we believe that people should be able to design the event of their dreams when they're booking one of our venues - and a big part of that is making sure that their catering choices aren't limited.

Gone are the days when venues would just have one lead caterer the client was obligated to use, and by opening our books to over 2000 caterers with Togather, we're opening ourselves to more enquiries and more people ultimately choosing to use the venues. A client is more likely to select a venue where they can have their pick of whatever style, cuisine or price point of caterer they want - which is why partnering with Togather makes total sense for us.

This means that we'll always something to suit everybody, because not everyone wants your seated, three-course, premium-end dinner right? They might want something a little more casual, for example street food style, or a buffet-style meal, and it's great for us to be able to be that one stop shop for clients who need everything sorted for their events.

When people think of Village Underground and EartH they might think of them as iconic cultural and music venues, and we want to remind them that they're some of the most unique and best venues in the country for any type of event, be it a brand promotion, product launch or Christmas party, and being able to offer an incredible range of catering is a big part of that.

Do you think that catering has become more important for organisers in 2024?

Categorically yes. In the past you would likely have an organiser coming directly to you hoping to sort out everything to do with the event and to take it out of their hands, but now people are looking for something much more bespoke, that perhaps fits their personal tastes of their company's DNA a little better - they want more oversight over their events and that means they want more choice.

By giving these clients that scope for much more choice, it makes us a far more desirable location for them to book their events through. People put so much effort into their events these days that want it be totally curated to them, and it's so important that we can offer that.

Further, event organisers are now majority Millennials and Gen-Z, and these generations really care about food. While perhaps with previous generations it was the case that they were stuck in their ways of what they liked - but now it's all about diversity, excitement and being to curate exactly what you want. Plus, it feels as if people may be throwing slightly fewer events than pre-Covid, but they're going all in on the ones they're doing, which adds much more importance to the food being perfectly curated to whatever client it is. They want a venue that's unique - and catering to match.

So what makes Village Underground and EartH such incredible venues to book?

I believe that clients are looking for a great story - they want to know what's behind the venue and feel inspired by it.

Both Village Underground and EartH have had incredible musical artists playing - for example Roses, Charli XCX and Raye - and not only that we but film a lot of music videos here, so people absolutely love how that underpins the venue's mythology.

In regard to EartH, there aren't many spaces in London where you have a tiered auditorium theatre with original art deco features that also has natural daylight and can accommodate 700 people. You just don't really get that and there aren't many venues of that kind of scale and size that also has a historic cultural and music background that this venue does.

And then looking at Village Underground, you've got the brickwork the whole way around, you've got a 20 meter ceiling height, you've got incredible sound and lighting infrastructure, and you've got a slap bang, prime location in Shoreditch. It can do everything, from your conferences to evening parties, to Christmas events, to your summer events. It can do both, because it has natural daylight as well the space, which, again, for a Victorian warehouse, is pretty unusual.