The Journal · The Brantford Club

Meeting Rooms in Brantford

Meeting rooms in Brantford come in four kinds: hotel conference rooms on Holiday Drive and Fen Ridge Court, university and library rooms downtown, municipal rooms the City and County rent by the hour, and the private rooms of The Brantford Club at 98 George Street, where the door closes and the kitchen sends lunch up when the agenda breaks.

A meeting room in Brantford is a room with a table, a door, and a screen that a company can hold for a morning or a day, and the city keeps more of them than a search suggests. The Brantford Club has kept several at 98 George Street since 1898, in an Italianate house with the Court House across the way. The directories that list the rest print three facts about each one, the address, the seating, and the projector, and leave out the one that decides a board meeting: whether the door closes and stays closed until you leave.

Every room on this page has a door. What differs is the other side of it between nine and four. At a hotel it is a corridor of other meetings and a front desk checking in a tour bus. At a library it is the public, which is the point of a library. At The Brantford Club it is a house the Club has occupied since 1898, and nobody in it is on their way to a different room. Each room below is placed by what it is built for.

Where can you book a meeting room in Brantford?

You can book a meeting room in Brantford through eight organizations, each on its own site. The Best Western Brantford Hotel and Conference Centre at 19 Holiday Drive and the TownePlace Suites by Marriott at 30 Fen Ridge Court publish their rooms with dimensions and setups. Wilfrid Laurier University rents boardrooms and classrooms on its downtown campus by an external bookings form. The Brantford Public Library at 173 Colborne Street takes requests by online form. The City of Brantford rents meeting rooms at Branlyn Community Centre, the County of Brant rents a board room and community rooms across its centres, and the Chamber of Commerce Brantford-Brant books its board room at 77 Charlotte Street by email. The Brantford Club takes enquiries for its rooms at 98 George Street by email or at 519-752-0931, and your event coordinator answers as soon as they are able.

Meeting Rooms in Brantford by What They Are For

Each room is sorted by the meeting it suits. Capacities and dimensions change without notice, so the table gives the kind of room and the use, and each listing gives its own numbers.

The hotels on Holiday Drive and Fen Ridge Court

The hotel meeting rooms in Brantford answer one question the other rooms cannot: where do the delegates sleep. The Best Western Brantford Hotel and Conference Centre at 19 Holiday Drive lists its rooms by name on its own event-spaces page, from seminar rooms set boardroom-style up to the Alexander G. Bell and Pauline Johnson rooms and the ballroom, each with dimensions, ceiling height, and seating by configuration, with on-site catering and a restaurant on the property. The TownePlace Suites by Marriott Brantford and Conference Centre at 30 Fen Ridge Court, off Highway 403, lists three halls and two breakout rooms on its Marriott meetings page, with projectors, microphones, and wireless internet, and names Affinity Conference Centre as its catering partner. Both are built for the two-day conference: general session downstairs, guests upstairs, breakfast in the lobby. For a board of eight, the trade is a corridor shared with whatever else the hotel booked that morning.

The campus and the library

Wilfrid Laurier University rents rooms on its Brantford campus to community groups and companies, and its own listing is the most detailed in the city. Room CB100 in the Carnegie Building holds a large boardroom table with twenty chairs; the Research and Academic Centre West has the Bill and Dorothy Campbell Boardroom and the Millard, Rouse and Rosebrugh Conference Room; the classrooms in Grand River Hall take a training day. Laurier asks for the request fifteen days ahead, a certificate of insurance, and a signed facility use agreement, and says plainly that parking is not provided and weekend bookings get no technical support. The Brantford Public Library at 173 Colborne Street lists a Third Floor Meeting Room, a Community Room, a Computer Lab, and an auditorium that divides into halves and quarters, each with a PC, projector, and screen; you request a room by online form and the Library calls back to confirm. A library room is a good room for a public session and a plain one for a private board, because the building belongs to everyone.

The municipal rooms

The City of Brantford and the County of Brant both rent meeting rooms and both publish the terms on their own pages. The City lists three meeting rooms at Branlyn Community Centre, 238 Brantwood Park Road, small, medium, and large, rented by the hour with a projector, screen, audio, and free parking; the same page lists the theatre at the Bell Homestead National Historic Site for a smaller group. The County of Brant lists the Wilkin Board Room at the Cowan Community Health Hub, the Renway Meeting Room at the Cainsville Community Centre, the Dumfries Room at the Brant Sports Complex, and community rooms at Burford and Gaukel Memorial, with insurance required and available through the County. These are the rooms for a workshop, a public consultation, or a committee that meets in Paris or Burford and wants to stay there. The door closes. The gymnasium next door keeps its own timetable.

The private house on George Street

The Brantford Club is a private members’ club and event venue at 98 George Street, at the corner of George and Nelson Streets, and its rooms have been set for the business of the city since the Club opened on December 31, 1898. The Club’s own corporate page says what the rooms are for: board meetings, seminars, mediations, and client dinners. When your meeting is booked, the room closes, the table is set, and nobody walks through your meeting on the way to theirs. Every event space carries complimentary high-speed Wi-Fi and conference technology for hybrid and in-person gatherings. The kitchen, under executive chef Eric Wasylenky, feeds the meeting from a working lunch at the table to full evening service, so the client lunch after the board meeting happens in the same house an hour later. Your event coordinator takes the enquiry and stays with it. The Court House is across the street, which is why mediations end up here. The rooms themselves are described in the rooms at 98 George Street, and the business done between meetings in where Brantford does its business.

The questions that come up

Sources: each room’s own listing, linked in the table, The Brantford Club’s meeting rooms page, and its book the club page. For halls and banquet rooms, see the event venues of Brantford. Two hotel listings, on Fen Ridge Court and Sinclair Boulevard, could not be read from their own sites on the day of writing and are left off until they can. Every other room the Journal has set beside the house is listed in the comparisons register. The rooms that compete for the meeting and the dinner after it each have an entry of their own: The Rope Factory, Camp 31, The Arlington Hotel, Ancaster Mill, Cambridge Mill, Langdon Hall, Best Western Brantford, Affinity Conference Centre, Whistle Bear. The full set is in the register of comparisons.