London is awesome – I am a massive fan. However, there are certain disadvantages of living here: one of which is that it has an unusually high concentration of very rich people. This becomes a problem when it comes to looking for nice places to have a wedding.
You see, any particularly lovely venues in London where it’s possible to hold a wedding reception know that they can get away with charging an arm and a leg as there are plenty of people in London who would be willing to pay it.
So if we were planning a small wedding of, say, 30 people we might look at a cost of £80-£90 a guest and think we can maybe make that work. It would end up being around £2,500. That’s OK. But when you’re initial idea of guest numbers is around 4 times that, the costs start getting pretty eye-watering!
What are the options then? Well, Plan A was to find a cool and interesting venue that doesn’t cost a fortune and dress it up for wedding fabulousness. We thought we had maybe struck gold with Islington Central Library which has a lovely hall we could have gotten for about a grand:
Nice right?
Yesterday morning we set off in high spirits to check out the hall and see if we could make it work. However, as soon as we set foot in it, we got rather deflated. It’s actually a bit tatty around the edges, plus our guests would have to enter through a nasty 70s library entrance in order to get to the hall. I’m all for saving money, but this is supposed to be a wedding and not an after-school club.
So Plan A was out the window.
Undaunted we decided to go for a wander into Angel and see if we could find any inspiration. First stop was the Town Hall. We knew there was a strong likelihood we’d end up probably doing the actual Civil Partnership here, so we thought we’d see if there was a chance to look round their uninspiring range of small and functional rooms. What we weren’t prepared for was this:
Wow!
It’s an incredible room that can accommodate all our guests and even has a balcony in case…. well….
(Just a thought!)
What it also means is that we could do a really nice service there and get all those sort of ceremony bits done before getting as quickly as possible to the part where everyone eats (the best part of any wedding). Rather than needing a wedding venue that could accommodate a ceremony as well as food – we could actually just take over a restaurant or pub for the day and use that as our reception space. And there are loads more options for that than there are for larger hall-type venues.
So now the search is on for an interesting pub or restaurant that can seat about 120 comfortably and not cost all the money in the world.
Being forced to try out pubs and restaurants around London?
Now THAT’s my kind of wedding planning!