My lovely intern Roo (oh I do love her so) had, to say the least, quite the drama with the search for the perfect wedding venue. So she’s here today to share her woes and in turn reassure those of you that might be going through the same hell, that it’s all going to be fine and that you will come out on the other side!  I personally found the venue hunt the most stressful part of my wedding planning. Why are wedding venues such a pain in the…ahem.

Over to you lady…

♥  ♥  ♥

Like so many modern-day women, I often find that the most apt precursor to the soundest advice can only come from an episode of Friends. In this instance, I’ll refer to “The One With Ross’s Wedding, pt. I”. Open your DVD inserts to chapter 4, and we’ll begin.

So, Emily (Mrs Ross Gellar-to-be) has her heart set on getting married in the same church that her parents did, in a nod to family tradition – which is all well and good until they get there and find that it’s in the process of being knocked down. Ross suggests putting off the wedding until they can schedule a different venue; easy peasy, except for the fact that Monica gently informs him that while he’s only been planning this wedding for a month, Emily has probably been planning it since she was five years-old – “ever since the first time she took a pillowcase and hung it off the back of her head”. (Don’t panic, by the way. Ross jumps a hackney down to Homebase to buy their entire range of fairy lights, and all is saved.)

You could suppose that this impossible situation is a fantastic work of fiction, however, it saddens me to inform you that the real spectrum of wedding venues is just as fraught with disaster. You needn’t expect demolition, but you ought to expect a fair amount of difficulty and a shedload of compromise. In my experience, I thought that the search for the perfect venue was going to be easy; I was wrong.

Lamb and I don’t practise any religion to speak of (unless McDonald’s milkshakes are considered divine in other parishes besides ours). Therefore, getting married in a holy place could never really be an option for us as a couple, since it would feel wrong to exchange vows in the eyes of someone/something that we’re not entirely sure we believe in the complete existence of. We thought that this would considerably cut out the clutter that we weren’t interested in, and fling open doors of opportunity elsewhere. Again, we were wrong.

Not unusually, we’d had that initial gush of: hey honey, we like to frolic amongst flora and fauna, right? – So why not get married outside? followed by a bit of research, then: oh wait, that’s not even legal in England. The law in England and Wales states that a wedding venue “must have a roof, be moored to its foundations, and licensed by the local registrar” (a summary of our laws courtesy of The Any Campaign, who are petitioning for the right to get married any time, any place. Please, please take two minutes to sign their petition and make the dreams of an outdoorsy future bride & groom come true).

We didn’t have anything set in stone, but I’d seen the wonderful Hannah & Landon’s beach-ceremony-followed-by-boat-reception (also featured on Rock n Roll Bride here) when they first got hitched in 2006, and it always stuck in my mind. After the initial disappointment in the restrictions of our country, we took a moment to consider our options, and our first real dream was realised. We figured out that our dream wedding would be one ginormous celebration – no fannying around a dusty registry office only to arse about with traveling to a reception destination later; no need for taxis or waiting around; just one big hoedown. Our venue had to offer us the legalities of a civil marriage ceremony, plus grub and dancing to boot. With that idea written in permanent marker on the metaphorical planning whiteboard, we got our teeth into it. So where would we begin looking?

This is my unhappy-with-venue-hunting face

It had been our dream to get married in Brighton; we fell in love here, we’ve made all our memories together here, and we’re quite certain that we want to settle here with our future buns in the oven. It all seemed so simple enough, but naturally it wasn’t. For starters, we had no idea what we were looking for. Sure, we knew what we wanted, but we didn’t know how to tell Google what we wanted. I’m not much of a search engine maestro, which became extremely telling as I found myself going around in circles until I’d ended up looking at places I wasn’t even interested in and thinking, will that just have to “do”?

I took my search to Twitter, throwing in a few cheeky hashtags to get the biters biting, and soon enough I was kindly directed towards a couple of promising links. To name my shortlisted favourites, I was shown an eco house (too small), Britain’s longest running aquarium (too fishy), and the Duke of York’s Picturehouse (too “themed”). The last is a particularly interesting tale, since it only obtained its wedding license after a couple so wanted to get married there that they bought the license for the building. At first, the idea of getting married in such a beautiful place so rich with heritage was really something else. Despite everything that it’s got going for it (I’m looking at you, can-can legs) it just didn’t feel very “us”, you know? And it has to. Above all else, it has to feel very you; both of you.

Photography Credit: Janet Cameron

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