London and South East Packaging Society is the largest and one of the most active packaging societies.

As well as its role in informing and educating, we attempt to provide a networking and socialising opportunity for our members.

The London Packaging Dinner, a black tie charity dinner since 2003 has been held at The Café Royal and The Savoy Hotel. For the past two years we have also held a very popular Thames river cruise.

There was a London branch of the Institute of Packaging for many years, but it folded in the early 1990's through a lack of technical people coming forward to fill the gaps, as people moved on and retired. For a while this was replaced by Thames Valley group that was quite active in the 90's but was dormant by 2001 and the Kent branchfor the same reason.

Roy Dixon was the driving force in 2002 behind the re-birth of a group based on a more London focus of packaging people with a background in retailing and creative industries.

The first meetings were held in what was then the Inkpen offices off Oxford Street and founder members included: Roy Dixon (Chairman), Raksha Barai, Gary Freeman (Treasurer) Chris Griffin, Ray Hamms (Membership), Barry Jones (Secretary) and Ken Mulholland (Vice Chairman).

The first event of the new London branch was a visit to Fullers brewery at Chiswick, after which we could claim that - yes, we could organise an event in a brewery!.

After a couple of years Roy stepped down as Chairman to become a committee member and to continue to represent the group on the national board - role he still undertakes today. Ken Mulholland took over and meetings moved to the John Lewis offices in Victoria.  

In 2006 following Ken's resignation, Barry Jones became Chairman and Chris Waterhouse, Secretary. Barry joined Roy on the national board in 2006.  In 2009 Jonathan Edwards became our first web master.

A major step towards establishing the group occurred when Barry Jones led the team on the first London Packaging Dinner in 2003.  Since then we have held six charitable dinners, at the Russell Hotel, Savoy and Cafe Royal and have raised over £15,000 for Great Ormond Street Children's hospital and Mencap. It is planned to hold the next dinner in the Autumn of 2010.  The Thames riverboat cruise was a new event in 2008 and 90 people attended this years trip.

With the absorpbtion of the Institute of Packaging into the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining the London branch became the London and South East Packaging Society.

As well as the the social and networking side of the society, we have held a number of lectures, covering topics as wide as: intellectual property, sourcing packaging in China, Japanese packaging developments In addition, there have been two very successful joint debates on the topics of the day with the Design Business Association.