ACCU on Sea 2026 - Location and Venue

The Venue

ACCU on Sea was hosted at the Leas Cliff Hall in Folkestone, England. This is the same venue that C++ on Sea had been hosted at in the past. Although I have been to ACCU twice, I had never been to C++ on Sea in person. So this was my first time to this venue.

The venue is built into the cliff face overlooking the sea. This meant that many of the rooms and central auditorium had balconies which looked out on to the sea:

This was taken from the balcony just out from the main() room. Below is the roof of the lower floor which had more rooms in which talks were held.

The rooms themselves were given fun C++ inspired names:

1. main(): This was the main stage where the keynotes, lightning talks, and evening events like the movie night were held.
2. const west: This was probably the smallest room, and it also didn’t have a balcony like many of the others so it felt quite stuffy in comparison to the rest.
3. std::cout: This was a fairly wide room that seemed to be able to hold well over 100 people. This was also the room where the speaker’s dinner was held.
4. east const: This was a decently sized room. Like std::cout, it had a balcony. This was also the room I gave my talk in.
5. unsigned: I don’t think I ever actually went into the room for any of the talks!

I did enjoy the naming of const west and east const. I am one of those people that accepts that the language is parsed from an east const perspective, but will still use const west because the majority of code bases I interact with does that.

Hotels

The Leas Cliff Hall is not also a hotel, which is unlike previous conferences I have gone to like CppCon, and ACCU. This meant that finding a nearby hotel was another decision that had to be made. Luckily for me as a speaker, I didn’t have to think too hard. The wonderful staff of the conference were able to sort me out in a nearby hotel. The same can not be said for Duncan however. Duncan is an engineer from Rare like me. He was given tickets at relatively short notice, and unfortunately due to this his choice of hotels wasn’t the best.

Most of the hotels that people stayed at were along the same coastal road as the venue. Even Duncan managed to get a hotel on that road. So even if you leave your booking really late, you are likely going to be able to find somewhere within a 5 minute walk of the conference hall.

I stayed at The View which was really quite nice. The breakfast was lovely, and the staff were really helpful. The one thing I would say is that the Wi-Fi signal on the 3rd floor (where I was) was diabolical. This meant that I often had to take my laptop down to the lobby to do stuff that required a reliable connection. This was a known problem according to one of the maintenance staff there. They have tried to fix the problem with some repeaters but to no avail. He also said it was just a 3rd floor issue. Every other floor was fine.

Travel

Traveling to Folkestone was pretty easy for me, and seemed to be pretty easy for most people. There is a direct train from London St Pancras to Folkestone Central. Then from the train station it is only about a 15/20 minute walk through Folkestone to get to the coastal road with all the hotels and the conference centre. There were a few people who also took the channel tunnel from France. So even traveling up from France/Europe seems to be quite easy.