The View from Edgar Street: director Dave Preedy says the Starlite Rooms are helping the whole club (From Hereford Times)

The View from Edgar Street: director Dave Preedy says the Starlite Rooms are helping the whole club

1:00pm Thursday 21st March 2013 in Sport

EACH week, leading figures from Edgar Street have their say. This week, it’s director Dave Preedy, who has played a key role in the refurbishment of the Starlite Rooms and Addison’s Bar.

SATURDAY’S win took us up to eighth place in the table, which is where I predicted we would finish at the start of the season so my career as a pundit is looking good.

But through this column, I would like to talk about off-field activities rather than what we do on the pitch.

Hereford United Football Club is not only about football, as many of you are finding out by attending the many functions and parties which take place at Edgar Street, week in, week out.

When I was first approached by the club chairman David Keyte regarding the refurbishment of the old Starlite Rooms, we decided that we wanted to create something that the people of Hereford could be part of. And not only sports fans.

We felt we wanted to create public areas and function rooms, so with the addition of Addisons Bar, which is open every day and night to the general public, we have the Starlite Rooms upstairs which caters for breakfasts and lunches, from Monday to Friday.

More often than not, diners find themselves having their breakfast or lunch alongside our first-team and youth-team footballers, which they always seem to enjoy.

Ellen Moore, our functions manager, is busy every day taking enquiries and bookings relating to the Starlite Rooms, Radford’s, the Vice-Presidents Club and Addison’s Bar.

Our behind-the-scenes team are available to help organisers with their events to ensure everything runs smoothly from start to finish.

Our main room, the Starlite Room can hold 200 people and we regularly have tribute and cabaret acts along with a two-course meal prepared by our in-house chef.

We cater for weddings, christenings, anniversaries, wakes, parties, reunions, meetings and seminars. But businesses have been quick to see the possibilities too as we have a large screen and projector available for presentations and videos and we can also provide sound equipment, too.

The diversity of our rooms allows us to host from six people to 200.

Like almost all football clubs, we have our battles to keep going financially and our off-field activities are very important to that but we are also a part of the community and we are committed to helping all community projects, so if a room is required for a meeting or charity fundraising event, we will waive the hire fee.

Our darts, skittles and pool teams are all enjoying their new facilities in Addison’s and we are always keen to invite new teams to join us.

We are very proud of what we have achieved and I must say a huge thank-you to all our loyal supporters, staff, volunteers and most of all customers, without whom, none of this would have been possible. Such has been the success of the Starlite Rooms that we are exploring expansion plans to cater for even more events.

We have had fantastic support for our function suites and every penny raised goes towards the football club to help in our fight to get back into the Football League, which is where we all want to be.