Architecture Groups London

FREE Walking Tour of Marylebone

[Please follow 👉this link👈 to reserve your place with the tour guide before you RSVP](https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-square-route-around-marylebone-tickets-1992480225992?) *Let me know if it sells out and you can have my spare ticket* Walk with us through some of London’s historic urban squares to discover stories of these elegant spaces and the people who lived in them. The importance of providing open spaces in the capital, especially in residential areas, was recognised as early as the 1600s, with the laying out of the first planned estates and the emergence of the distinctive London garden square. Today these urban squares are some of the most admired features of London’s streetscape and have long attracted many famous residents from the arts, literature, music, politics and other fields. Followed by social at a venue near Manchester Square. *See comments below for updates*

London Built Environment August 2026 Mayfair Networking Breakfast

IMPORTANT: PLEASE BOOK YOUR TICKET USING THE EVENTBRITE LINK London Built Environment is the Capital's only business network dedicated to professionals working within London’s property based and related industries. Our networking events are extremely relaxed and casual affairs and attended by a wide range of business sectors with everyone from developers & solicitors to architects, investors to estate agents... Each ticket includes teas, coffees and juices and a full breakfast food buffet (including vegetarian options) and your own printed attendee sheet to take away. Join us for our August 2026 Business Networking Breakfast at the Fabulous Bonds of Mayfair - in their private lounge for a delicious breakfast, drinks and the opportunity to talk property, make new friends and seek out fresh business leads. • No Speeches • No Talks or Schedule • No Membership Fees • No Sales Presentations Just pure relaxed networking in a friendly environment. Running for over a Decade our events are a proven, cost effective and fun way to generate new business.

London Built Environment July 2026 City Of London Networking Lunch

IMPORTANT: PLEASE BOOK YOUR TICKET USING THE EVENTBRITE LINK London Built Environment is the Capital's only business network dedicated to professionals working within London’s property based and related industries. Our networking events are extremely relaxed and casual affairs and attended by a wide range of business sectors with everyone from developers & solicitors to architects, investors to estate agents... Each ticket includes a delicious full lunch buffet (including v. options), a drink (alcholic or soft) and your own printed attendee sheet to take away. Join us for our July 2026 Business Networking Lunch at the Fabulous Refinery, City Point Next To Moorgate Station In The Heart Of The City Of London - in their private lounge for lunch, drinks and the opportunity to talk property, make new friends and seek out fresh business leads. • No Speeches • No Talks or Schedule • No Membership Fees • No Sales Presentations Just pure relaxed networking in a friendly environment. Running for almost Two Decade our events are a proven, cost effective and fun way to generate new business.

AWS London Well-Architected User Group July Meetup... Summer Special!

Hi Architects, **[Pls Note different venue and timings this month.]** Welcome to our the July AWS London Well-Architected User Group Meetup!!! 🥳🥳🥳 As this is our last before the summer and as we had to cancel June's due to the excessive heat, we have arranged a something special for July. July's meetup will be held at: Amazon/AWS (LHR14), 60 Holborn Viaduct, London EC1A 2FD We have three amazing speakers with spectacular presentations: * Alam Ahmed \- Cloud / DevOps Engineer @ BOXXE \| Terraforming The Well\-Architected Way * Sudipto Ghosh \- Fullstack Engineer and Site Reliability Engineer at JPMorgan Chase \| sudiviz: X\-ray vision for your cloud infrastructure * Storm Manterola \- Solution Architect @ Amazon Web Services \| Agentic Operations Center: context\-aware infrastructure So come join us at 5.30pm for a 6.00pm start, including drinks, snacks and friendly networking after our talks :-) **Please remember to bring a government ID such as driving license or passport for registration.** The AWS London Well-Architected Meetup is the latest chapter in the most popular AWS Meetup group globally. At each meetup we cover off various pillars of AWS best-practice in detail including insights from industry leaders that specialise in the Well-Architected Framework.

EGYPT, EUSTON & THE COPTIC EXPRESS

(pictured: Greater London House\*) On this walk we’re going to: · explore the rare\*\* Egyptian Revival, which used Obelisks, the Scarab, Lotus, and Sphinx, the ‘pylon’ wall and cavetto cornice, richly coloured and decorated, · review the progress of the HS2 tunnels and terminus at Euston, and study the much-criticised 1960’s National Rail station, · see actual Egyptian columns, with palm-leaf capitals, inscribed with hieroglyphs, AND the trilingual ‘document’ which first made it possible, in 1802, to translate Egyptian, · go to the 2nd-ever Pizza Express in Coptic Street: over white wine and snacks, I will point out the interior features of the Dairy Supply Company (forerunner of Express Dairies) whose former purpose-built premises—still largely unaltered--the restaurant now occupies, PLUS outline the history and buildings of the Egyptian Coptic Christian Church\*\* in England. We’ll meet\*\*\* at Mornington Crescent Station, designed in his ‘oxblood terracotta’ style by Leslie Green, for the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway in 1907, and see the refurbished and renamed Carreras’ 1928 cigarette factory\*, largest example of the Egyptian Revival in the UK. (A year from now, 16m below this point, the 7 km long HS2 tunnels from Old Oak Common, started in January, and funded by the taxpayer, are expected to emerge) To Britons, the Pharoahs’ Egypt was unknown, out of reach, and beyond understanding. It was Napoleon’s invasion, and his defeat by Nelson, in 1798, that sparked off a wave of sensational interest in its motifs, and their application to all areas of design, especially in France and Britain. ‘Egyptomania’ was infectious, and Egyptian Revival architecture was seen as fresh, different and modern. Architects and designers, previously strait-jacketed within the Greek- and Roman-Revival styles, delighted in the sudden availability of new shapes and forms, plentiful colour and surface decoration. The massive pylon architrave and giant cavetto cornice lent themselves to powerful compositions for Synagogues, mausoleums and prisons, in Europe, America and Australia. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the first performance, in Cairo, in 1871, of Verdi’s Aida, set in the palaces, temples, halls and dungeons of Ancient Egypt, and the erection, in 1878, on the Victoria Embankment, of the 1500 BC red granite obelisk called Cleopatra’s Needle, found in a sandbank near Alexandria, kept interest alive. Discoveries of tombs and mummies continued throughout the 1800’s until Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankamen’s tomb in 1922 led to a another wave of buildings which blended Egyptian motifs with Art Deco. Most recently, the storehouse of Egyptian motifs was plundered by Post-Modernist architects, notably ‘Naked Gardener’ Ian Pollard in 1988, at the Warwick Road Homebase, described by Oliver Wainwright as ‘a camp Egyptian fantasy with friezes of Gods wielding power-tools’. The Egyptian features were over-painted white by its owners soon after opening, and it was closed and demolished in 2014. In an ironic echo, among the HS2 preparatory work, over the past 10 years, was clearance of the St James’ Gardens graveyard, containing about 60,000 souls, and respectful removal of their remains. In fact, HS2 have cleared an 11-platform wide swathe of city, including mature trees and 2 big office blocks, erased Cardington Street, truncated Drummond and Coburg Streets, and restricted Hampstead Road. But while they were busy with that preparatory work, the scale of the project halved, from 530 km length to 230 km, from 11 destinations to 1, from 18 trains per hour to 9, and from a target train speed of 250 mph to 200 mph. However, unintended and temporary, a charming maze of car-free passageways has been created on the west side of the station: we will use one to access the station. But key piece of the HS2 connectivity diagram, the new Euston station complex, including a combined Euston Square and Euston tube station, and a pedestrian subway under the Euston Road, will not be complete until ‘2033…or 2043’. Public funding has been ruled out, and a recently-promised planning application for an over-site development will not be lodged for until a year from now. Ambitions for the station have been dramatically reduced, from aiming for a world-class, 300m longtitudinal concourse above 11 platforms, covered by a dramatic ‘tee-pee’ roof by RIBA Gold Medal and Stirling Prize winners Grimshaw Architects, to 10, and now to only 6, fitted into the west side of the National Rail station. Abandoned designs cost £250m. It was just before the election of 2010 that the Brown government announced their intention to build a high-speed railway between London, the Midlands, the North of England, and Scotland, having made sure the Conservatives would support it. It was claimed it would have the capacity equivalent of 2 full-size motorways, at half the cost. Now, official policy, stated by Heidi Alexander, Minister of Transport, is that HS2 *will* be completed, but at the lowest possible cost, even if this extends the programme. For example, it was recently suggested that Avanti West Coast’s current 150mph Pendolino trains will use the now-surplus capacity on the HS2 tracks and in its stations. Therefore, with new interest, we will review the existing station, designed by British Rail, in a more confident age, which soldiers on, with minimal ‘wow factor’ and amid relentless criticism, valiantly coping with the highest UK mainline station footfall (that is, excluding tube and overground traffic). It uses a rational, modernist design, and durable materials: polished black granite, white mosaic and dark grey engineering brick, and a low, utilitarian trainshed, appropriate for a fully-electrified railway, which doesn’t need headspace for diesel exhaust, and so allowed a parcels depot to cover the entire north half above the platforms, to get parcels to trains without circulation conflicts. Crossing Euston Road, we are expected for a very fast group visit to The Petrie Flinders Institute of Archeology at UCL. We will follow their ’10 objects route’ giving human interest context: Pharaohs’ spells, mummy portraits (of the deceased’s face), pottery, a bead-net dress and a faience ‘ankh’, the symbol for life. Then, using the less-busy Montagu Place entrance, we will go through the Sculpture Gallery of the British Museum\*\*\* to see 4 actual, real, Ancient Egyptian columns, decorated and incised, dating from the 1st millennium BC, AND the actual, real, 200 BC Rosetta Stone, found by Napoleon’s army, and since 1802 the most-visited thing, in the 2nd most-visited place in the UK! We exit by the South Portico, and the walk will end at the ‘Pizza Express’ in Coptic Street, 400m from Tottenham Court Road Station. This is a shorter walk, only 2.5 km, out of deference to the heat, but full of interest! Hope you can come! Andy \*converted to offices, refurbished and renamed ‘Greater London House’. \*\* Egyptian Revival and Coptic Church examples in London are few and far between, but we’ll see as much as possible and I will show numerous pictures and diagrams during the introduction and later discussion. \*\*\*the route will be shaded if it is sunny, and there will be access to cooled interiors. Bring sun-block or a parasol and as little else as possible. Your bag may be searched as we enter the British Museum. PS feel free to call me on 07722 547310 if you are planning to attend but get delayed.

AWS User Group UK Meetup #78

Welcome to our July event. We're delighted to welcome [Guilherme Dalla Rosa](https://www.linkedin.com/in/guidr/), CTO, MerCloud and [Matt Johnson](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattjohnsonuk/), Principal Technologist, MongoDB Here's what they're bringing: Serverless makes scaling easy. Multi-tenancy makes it dangerous. **Guilherme** has built and operates a live B2B SaaS platform on exactly this architecture, where one misconfigured IAM policy can put one tenant's data in front of another. He has wired Amazon Cognito, Amazon DynamoDB, and AWS Lambda together to keep millions of tenant-partitioned records isolated under real production load. Tonight **Guilherme** is walking us through the IAM policy-based isolation patterns that actually hold up, and the deployment-model trade-offs behind them. MongoDB Atlas isn't a database running on EC2. It's a hyperscale platform that MongoDB engineered on top of AWS. **Matt** works at the intersection of data, security, and cloud architecture, and he's here to open up how Atlas is actually provisioned and operated under the hood. Tonight **Matt** is giving us the engineering story: how MongoDB's own teams run Atlas on AWS, and how PrivateLink, KMS, IAM, and Marketplace are wired in to handle networking, security, and procurement. If **England** make it through to the semi-final, then we will be showing the first half for those interested. For the second half, we will decamp to the pub. A big thank you to our sponsors [Cloudscaler](https://rebrand.ly/cloudscaler), [Rayo](https://rebrand.ly/rayo-cloud) & [The Scale Factory](https://rebrand.ly/scalefactory) for making this event possible. **Programme:** 18:00: Arrival, registration 18:15: Talks start 20:00: Networking with food and a drink provided by the generosity of our sponsors. **Talk 1:** ***Building Secure and Efficient SaaS Platforms on AWS Serverless*** with Guilherme Dalla Rosa Let's go on a journey through the world of multi-tenant architectures on AWS using serverless technologies. In this talk, we will uncover the key aspects of multi-tenancy, including security, tenant isolation, and performance. We will learn how to utilise Cognito for authentication, DynamoDB to store millions of tenant-partitioned records and lambda for compute. We will also explore different deployment models and their tradeoffs, and, finally, we will learn how to implement policy-based isolation with IAM to keep our execution context tied to one specific tenant and avoid data leakage. By the end of this talk, you will feel more confident building SaaS applications on AWS with serverless technologies and you will have learned some of the many insights that come from the AWS Well-Architected SaaS Lens. **Learning Takeaways** * Implement IAM policy-based isolation to scope each Lambda execution context to a single tenant and prevent data leakage * Evaluate pool, silo, and bridge deployment models - the cost, complexity, and isolation trade-offs of each * Use Amazon Cognito and DynamoDB together for tenant-partitioned authentication and millions of tenant-scoped records at scale * Apply AWS Well-Architected SaaS Lens patterns to make defensible, production-ready architectural decisions * Automate tenant provisioning from the start - the patterns that work at five tenants break at fifty **Guilherme Dalla Rosa** Guilherme is a seasoned software engineer with extensive industry experience, having contributed to projects across Brazil, Ireland, and the UK. He currently serves as the CTO of MerCloud, a B2B e-commerce platform that streamlines the sales process for companies. In addition to his leadership role at MerCloud, Guilherme is also an AWS Community Builder, where he actively shares his expertise and passion for leveraging technology to help businesses enhance their processes and achieve their goals. **Talk 2:** ***MongoDB Atlas on AWS - A Deep Dive with Matt Johnson*** MongoDB Atlas is more than a managed database service running on EC2. It is a cloud-native data platform engineered to take advantage of AWS infrastructure, automation, and security services so teams can build resilient, scalable applications without stitching the operational pieces together themselves. In this deep dive for the AWS user group, we'll unpack how Atlas is deployed and operated on AWS: How our internal teams provision and manage Atlas and how AWS-native integrations such as PrivateLink, KMS, IAM, and Marketplace simplify networking, security, and procurement. **Learning Takeaways** * Understand how MongoDB's own teams provision and operate Atlas on AWS, not just how the service looks from a customer's seat. * See how Atlas is engineered as a cloud-native platform, using AWS infrastructure and automation for resilience and scale that customers would otherwise build themselves. * Learn how AWS-native integrations - PrivateLink, KMS, IAM and Marketplace - are wired in to handle networking, security and procurement under the hood. **Matt Johnson** Matt is a Principal Technologist at MongoDB with over 15 years of experience across cloud architecture, security, data platforms, and developer ecosystems. He specializes in helping organizations build secure, compliant, and scalable data and AI systems, with a focus on cloud resilience, AI governance, and data automation. Matt regularly speaks on the intersection of data, security, and AI, helping teams turn emerging technologies into trusted, production-ready solutions. Do you have a story to share? If you are interested in speaking at one of our events, please check out our [call for papers](https://awsuguk.org/call-for-papers/). We are advocates for greater inclusion & diversity in UK Tech and are especially keen to receive talk submissions from people in underrepresented groups. If you are interested in speaking at a future meetup but would like to discuss what to expect or need assistance, please contact our Inclusion & Diversity Lead Natalie Gray - [graynataliej@gmail.com](mailto:graynataliej@gmail.com) or DM her @natjgray *** Check out our [website](https://awsuguk.org/) for more information about our community and our code of conduct. Remember to follow us @AWSUserGroupUK and on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/aws-ug-uk) for the latest updates, and you can find videos of our past meetups [here](https://awsuguk.org/our-videos/).

Master Manual Mode at Tate Modern

Rye & Winchelsea by High Speed Rail

We will take the javelin railway from St Pancras to visit the historic towns of Rye & Winchelsea in East Sussex. Rye is a medieval town suspended in time with cobbled streets & ancient passageways leading to Tudor & Georgian architectural treasures. The town has several medieval churches & the Ypres Tower which affords fine views along the coast . Rye has many literary links; Henry James & EF Benson lived here & set some of their works in the town. Winchelsea is an “Antient town” one of the original Cinque Ports. Built in the 13th century on the orders of Edward 1, it is the best preserved medieval Bastide towns in Southern England. The stone gateways within the town walls allow access to the captivating town with many fine Georgian streets. Winchelsea has many links to artists; Turner & Millais were inspired by its charms Plan is to alight in Winchelsea to explore the town before having lunch at the pub by the town square. We will then do the 1066 walk passing Camber Castle to reach Rye. Walk is around 4 miles. We will then explore Rye with a late afternoon tea stop in one of the tea gardens. Regular trains back so people can leave at any time. Option for a coastal walk after to Camber Sands & beaches. Meet from 10.00am at Benugo cafe, balcony opposite Betjeman statue. South Eastern Javelin trains depart from platforms 11-13, 10.35am. £5 for meet up fees. A good knowledge of English history is required for this event. Frequent trains back to London so people can leave at anytime.

Composition in ballet photography with Julia.

Top 10 Event-Driven Architecture Pitfalls by Victor Rentea

**vJUG is moving to Luma. Please register at [https://luma.com/u1ifnmka](https://luma.com/u1ifnmka)** You send a message instead of calling a REST API - what can possibly go wrong? ​Welcome to the Event-Driven Adventure Park, where every message is a rollercoaster ride! Hold tight as we race through the wild loops of duplicate deliveries, out-of-order twists, and race conditions. Survive the dual-write drop, escape the consumer error maze, solve the lost message quest, and mind the privacy pirates lurking in the shadows. We’ll have 10 thrilling rides — all real war stories collected with ❤️ from 150 companies Victor trained at. Whether you’re an architect, coder, or ops hero, get ready for a wild tour through the quirks and best practices of messaging systems. No REST, just ride! 🎪 ​Your Speaker: **Victor Rentea** is a Java Champion specialising in delivering training sessions for mid- to senior-level developers and architects. Thousands of engineers from over 150 companies have attended Victor’s workshops, enabling him to develop deep insights across a variety of application domains. Distilling the lessons learned from these sessions, he gave countless educational yet entertaining talks at top conferences, where he’s known as ‘the speaker with the soundboard’. In his spare time, Victor coaches individuals and teams and organises online meetups for the European Software Crafters community. More at [https://victorrentea.ro](https://victorrentea.ro/?utm_source=luma)

An Exploration of Human Expression and Its Future

What makes us human, and what do we risk losing when AI begin to mirror our most intimate forms of expression? As AI becomes woven into our everyday workflows, from vibe coding to documentation, it's easy to focus on efficiency. But what about the rest of our lives? This session invites you to slow down and turn your attention toward something deeper: the arts. Dancing, singing, drawing, making, not as hobbies, but as expressions of something fundamental about who we are and where we come from. Whether you're excited about what AI can create, cautious about what it might erode, or somewhere in between, this conversation is for you. We're not here to reach consensus. We're here to share our views and think together. **What we'll explore** Inspired by the [Centre for Humane Technology](https://www.humanetech.com/ai-and-humanity)'s report *Preserving What Makes Us Deeply Human in the Age of AI*, we'll explore questions around why we create. What role does art play in our lives, not just aesthetically, but psychologically, socially, and spiritually? And as AI enters these spaces, what questions should we be asking ourselves? **From reflection to practice** We won't leave it abstract. Towards the end of the session, we'll bring the conversation back to our work as UX Designers and Researchers, exploring how these reflections can meaningfully shape the way we design, research, and lead. *** **🎓 A moment of celebration** We'll close the evening by celebrating the nine fellows who have completed the third [Responsible Design for Change Fellowship](https://www.ux4change.org/responsible-design-for-change-fellowship/) cohort. Their dedication to advancing social impact at the East London Waterworks Park, while deepening their practice in regenerative design and leadership, is worth sharing with our UX for Change community. *** **🎟️ Free spots available** We believe access to these conversations matters. If you'd like to be considered for one of the 7 free tickets, please fill out this short form: 👉[https://forms.gle/YgPFKeSXtZDMVaVU9](https://forms.gle/YgPFKeSXtZDMVaVU9)

Laundrette, Modern Cafe Shoot + Location Photography Walkabout with Models 📸