My Reading Hen Do: A Real Maid of Honour's Review

Editor's Note (December 2025): This real story from a past Maid of Honour has been updated to ensure all travel tips and activity details are current for the 2025 season.

It’s great when you have a best friend, and I am lucky enough to have two. Lucy and Lisa lived on the same road as me when we were tiny, and we’ve all grown up together – we're known as the Three L’s (because I’m Leona), and we are as thick as thieves.

When Lucy got engaged, she picked both of us to be her Maids of Honour, which meant we all got to plan this Hen do together! Lucy doesn’t like a long drive, which meant that we had to plan our destination very carefully. While London could have been in the radius, we decided that we didn’t really want those kinds of crowds. Instead, we settled on a city that most of us have been to before and had a great night out in – **Reading**.

Friday: Apartments & Cocktails

To start with, we’d booked ourselves into a pair of **Amazing Apartments**. We’d all decided that was a better plan than hotel rooms because it meant that we had living space where we could all sit together communally, rather than meeting in someone's room and perching awkwardly on the bed!

So with our cars parked and our bags dropped off, the next stop was our first activity of the weekend – **Cocktail Making** at a popular cocktail bar. Honestly, I cannot recommend this enough for anyone booking a hen do. We had such great fun. There was a barman who taught us all how to make a wide variety of cocktails. Before long, you end up with a pile of cocktails that need drinking (especially if you are the sort of person who will drink any cocktail imaginable!).

We’d made a decision when booking that the Friday night was going to be our “planned” night out, so we ended up in a nightclub where we had a **Booth and Drinks Package** pre-booked. This was the best idea we’ve ever had, as it meant we could sit down and didn’t have to queue at the bar.

Saturday: Recording Studio & Burlesque

Saturday morning was spent recovering at the apartments. After recovery time, we were all off to our next activity, and this was the one we knew that Lucy would be excited about. We’d booked ourselves a **Recording Studio Session**!

Obviously, we let Lucy take the lead (partly because it was her hen do, and partly because she has the best voice of us all), but we managed to smash through three popular songs, with all of us appearing on the CD that we were given at the end. Lucy didn’t stop smiling all the way through the session.

Once you’ve done some singing, then dancing is the next logical step. So we’d booked a dance class very near to the studio – and to make it interesting, we’d booked a **Burlesque Dance Class**. With feather boas in hand, we were all soon shimmying, grinding, and shaking our way through a routine that the instructor told us was guaranteed to impress our other halves!

Saturday Night: The Cheesy Club

With our activities done, we were back to the apartments to get changed. Unlike the previous night, we had decided to just see what happened on the Saturday night out, with no timetable or plan in place whatsoever.

Luckily, the entire night went perfectly. To cap the entire evening off, we found our way to a nightclub that was so cheesy it may as well have been made entirely of Cheddar! This cheese fest was absolutely what we needed to finish the weekend off, dancing our hearts out to everything from the Spice Girls to S Club 7 well into the early morning.

The Verdict

Our Reading Hen Do was an absolutely amazing weekend away and was perfect in every way. The locals were friendly, the drinks were cheaper than they might have been elsewhere, and the atmosphere was party central all weekend long.

The Stag and Hen Experience has been creating bespoke weekends since 2009. If you want to replicate this itinerary, get in touch on 01202 566100 or browse our Reading Hen Guide to start planning.