About this list

A free, complete list of every venue in England and Wales licensed to hold a civil marriage or civil partnership, with nothing to sign up for.

Why this exists

Every wedding directory in Britain is a list of venues that paid to be on it. That is a reasonable business, but it means none of them can answer the first question anyone asks: where, near us, are we allowed to get married at all?

The answer already exists. Councils approve premises for civil ceremonies and the government publishes the list — as a PDF, ordered by council rather than by anywhere you would think to look. This site is that list: read out of the PDF, given a position on a map, and given a page for every area of England and Wales.

Nothing here is sponsored or ranked. The order is the alphabet, or your own distance from a place if you ask for that.

Where the data comes from

Every venue on this site is taken from the approved premises list published by GOV.UK, last updated 17 October 2025. That list is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. This site is not affiliated with any government body.

That list is a snapshot rather than a live register. It is republished at irregular intervals — once after a gap of two years — and GOV.UK’s own caveat is that not every venue currently approved appears on it. A venue missing from this site may have been approved since the date above, and a council can approve premises at any point between one edition and the next.

Venue websites and photographs come from OpenStreetMap (ODbL), Wikidata (CC0) and Wikimedia Commons, where each photograph carries its own licence and its photographer is credited on the page it appears on.

How to read an entry

The date is paperwork, not a diary. Every entry shows the date the premises’ approval runs to. Approved until 30 September 2026 means the paperwork was current on the last published list. Record lapsed means that date has passed without a renewal being recorded centrally, which is common: around a third of all entries show a past date, including some of the best known venues in the country. It is not a refusal, and it is not an availability calendar — confirm the date with the venue.

The council named is not always the area you are browsing. Each entry names the council that approved the premises, and for 44% of venues that is a different body from the area the venue sits in. It is almost always two-tier local government: the county approves premises inside one of its districts, so a venue in Gosport is approved by Hampshire. Both are correct answers to different questions — the area page says where the venue is, the entry says who to ask.

The picture is labelled, and none of it is invented. Where a freely licensed photograph of the building exists it is used, and the photographer is credited at the foot of the page. Where one does not, the picture is a screenshot of the venue’s own website and says so underneath it. Where there is neither, the tile is the venue’s name, set as type. There is no stock photography on this site and no AI-generated picture of any venue.

The links leave this site on purpose. Venue website is the venue’s own address, found from OpenStreetMap and Wikidata or by matching a domain against the postcode. Ceremonies on the council website appears instead where a venue has no site of its own — a register office, a town hall, a ceremony room inside a civic building — and goes to the council’s own page about getting married there. It is always a gov.uk or gov.wales address belonging to the council named on the entry. Photos & reviews on Google Maps opens a Google search for that venue, which is where its own photographs and what people have written about it can be read.

What this list covers, and what it does not

England and Wales only. Scotland and Northern Ireland license the person conducting the ceremony rather than the building, so no equivalent list exists there.

Civil ceremonies on approved premises. Churches, chapels and other religious buildings are on a separate register and are not included here.

No reviews or ratings of its own. There are none here, and no venue is photographed for this site. It is also why nothing is ordered by anything except the alphabet or your own distance from it.

Contact

Something wrong, missing, or out of date? info@weddingvenuelist.co.uk.