Where we came from

Wallacespace is a family business, owned and run by me, Renata Wallace, and my husband Roy, in tandem with our team of highly committed people.

We own our own business and have always funded it ourselves. We are not at the beck and call of anyone else’s balance sheet i.e. Venture Capital or Angel funds and this means that we don’t have to keep public shareholders or private financiers happy. We decide what we want to do, when we want to do it, in the interests of building a good business, employing good people, doing a good job.

 

Wallacespace started in June 2002

Originally, I started Wallace Cititraining in 1991 in the back bedroom of a rented Battersea house. Roy, whose career was in the advertising industry as a Strategy Planner, named the company and paid the rent until the business started making a reasonable way.

As it got bigger, I moved the business to 5 Dryden Street in Covent Garden, not far from where we are now on Parker Street. We were 3 people in a 200 sq ft office in a business centre.

Wallace Cititraining was and still is Europe’s leading financial training company providing training to investment bankers needing to pass specific licensing exams for the American Securities industry.  This meant that I needed space in which to run our own programmes.  We were organising New York-based American instructors to come over to London and deliver regular, classroom-based programmes. Our clients were the powerhouse investment banks like Barclays Capital, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.

As part of looking for good places in which to run our programmes, I walked the streets of London and searched exhaustively to find good venues. I never did find anywhere good enough. By this I mean somewhere that was a nice place to be, that was affordable and that offered a good enough service. At the time there were only expensive, smart, and very corporate hotels or over-priced mid-range and not very good ones: expensive, inflexible, rooms in the basement – dark and a long way from anyone who could or would, help serve the coffee.

I was that client from hell, or as I saw it, just a client with simple but eminently reasonable standards. If we ordered the laptop to be ready and projecting by 8am, then it didn’t seem too much to expect that to happen. In practice, despite asking nicely and being very patient, it just never, ever did.

In short there just was nowhere in London that had as its focus, offsite meeting space for the likes of anything from training programmes to workshops and seminars. So, we decided to set it up.

Wallacespace Covent Garden started with 2 rooms as a blueprint in 2002. Once it proved itself, and it did prove itself quickly, we took more space at Dryden Street in 2005, and even more in 2006. In 2007 Dukes Road came onto the market.  Roy already knew the building, having worked with St Lukes in the past. We knew immediately that it was a great location for wallacespace and we signed the lease there in November that year.

In January 2008 Roy and I agreed that the business was now big enough for us to need him involved full time in the business and we have been working together ever since. Our Spitalfields building opened its doors in 2016 and in January 2020 we opened 53, Parker Street (Covent Garden) and we now employ more than 100 people across 4 buildings.

Where are we going to?

Wallacespace continues to evolve. We are committed to considering, reconsidering, refreshing or just plain changing what we do, so that we continue to deliver what our clients want, when they want it.