Recording a Podcast at Royal Maritime House

Podcasts get recorded in spare bedrooms, in hotel suites with the air conditioning off, and in studios that sound like studios. Occasionally someone wants a room with something behind it: a place the guest is pleased to have come to, that sounds like somewhere rather than nowhere.

Royal Maritime House is a Victorian building on the Ryde seafront with a restaurant upstairs and two private rooms below it. We host interviews, filmed conversations and recordings there. Here is the honest version of what that gets you.

The rooms

• The 1982. The chef’s table, with a window into the kitchen. Seats eight to sixteen. Good for a conversation with the kitchen in the background.
• The 1945. A larger room with its own bar and double sliding doors, for twelve to twenty. The doors matter: they close, and the room is separate from everything else.
• The dining room and terrace upstairs, for anything that wants the Solent in shot or in the background.

Both rooms are on the lower ground floor, which is quiet, and both have Sonos, which can be turned off. There is no step-free access down there, so tell us in advance if that matters.

The honest part

This is not a recording studio. There is no acoustic treatment, no booth and no engineer on site. The rooms are hard-surfaced: marble tables, plaster, glass. Bring your own kit, bring blankets or panels if you are fussy about reflections, and bring someone who knows how to set a level.

What we can tell you is when the building is quiet. The restaurant is open to the public Tuesday to Sunday in June, July and August, and Thursday to Sunday from September to May. On the days in between, the house is at its quietest, with no service running and nobody carrying plates over your take.

Why bother coming here

• The guest turns up. Lunch from Chef Robert Thompson MBE’s kitchen is a better invitation than a Zoom link.
• It is closer than it looks. Twenty-two minutes on the FastCat from Portsmouth Harbour to Ryde Pier Head, then a five-minute walk. London to the table in about two and a half hours.
• There is plenty to film. A kitchen, a terrace, a seafront and a cellar in one building, which is a day of B-roll for a video version.
• The food can be the episode. If your episode is about food, you can record it, cook it and eat it in the same afternoon.

How it works

Tell us the date, how many people, and whether you need the room for half a day or the whole thing. We’ll tell you what’s free, what it costs and what the kitchen can do around it. Bigger productions, film crews and launches are covered on the events and hire page, and there is a longer piece on filming at the house.

If you are doing this as part of a launch rather than a series, the product launch guide covers the rest of the day.

Questions we get asked

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