Return of the Blockers’ Lunch
10/02/2021
In a year that’s short on Dates for your Diary, here is one: 2 December is the day when we anticipate the 2021 Blockers’ Lunch. The event is already sold out, but if you are one of those on the guest list, congratulations, and if not, we thought we would revisit previous years’ lunches to demonstrate what you (but hopefully, in this unpredictable year, not everyone) will be missing.
Shaun Carroll writes: For some fifteen years the first Thursday in December has been pretty much carved in stone for the Blockers’ Lunch and whilst I seem to get credited with its invention this is certainly not the case.
Its actual founder was Norman Kenvyn who was the at the time the CEO of St Helens Finance PLC, a listed lender based in the City. Once a year Norman would take a handful of his Block Funders and brokers out for a lunch which invariably ran well into the evening, and I really looked forward to it.
When St Helens started to wind in its operation, I could see an opportunity to pick up the event and widen the audience by creating what would be a non-corporate “corporate event” with no one being in the chair, so to speak.
One of the reasons I love London is that for me it has the best pubs — and my favourite at the time was Smiths ,which is just off Cornhill via a labyrinth of alleyways. Upstairs in Smiths you find what could loosely be called a restaurant which specialises in delicious “School Dinners,” each supplied with a sausage.
So, in 2005 the first official Blockers’ Lunch was duly held at Simpson and there were thirty attendees, all of whom we were shoehorned into incredibly tight benches. The noise was ridiculous but the food was great. Drink was consumed in Biblical proportions, and the atmosphere was electric.
The event was incredibly well-received and the year after the numbers were increased to around sixty — well past the capacity of what Simpsons could service, but no one cared, and the status of the event only increased.
By now the Blockers’ lunch appeared to be everyone’s favourite event of the year and there are plenty of brilliant stories which bear testament to this — all of which are best regaled over a beer rather than in the erudite pages of Leasing World I’m afraid.
It was then suggested that perhaps we had outgrown Simpsons and we should think of another venue. And by then I was a regular at Hispania, a beautiful Spanish restaurant which was ( and is ) part owned by a friend of mine called Ignacio. He very kindly offered to host pre drinks for the Blockers Lunch, and this went really well. The following year the event migrated in its entirety to Hispania.
The Blockers’ Lunch was now ‘upmarket’, something which had never been the intention. Its appeal had widened and demand went on to outstrip supply still further.
(This is an updated and edited version of the original article from Leasing World magazine, issue 155)
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