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
The venues on this site come from the approved premises list published by GOV.UK, last updated 17 October 2025, and from the councils’ own lists of approved venues, last checked 29 September 2026. The GOV.UK list is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. This site is not affiliated with any government body.
The GOV.UK 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. So this site also checks each council’s own list of approved venues periodically, and adds the venues a council lists that GOV.UK does not. Every area page links to the approving council’s own list, where the council publishes one. A council can approve premises at any point between one check and the next.
Venue websites come from OpenStreetMap (ODbL), Wikidata (CC0) and the councils’ own lists, and photographs from 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 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 36% 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 in its corner. 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. Website is the
venue’s own address, found from OpenStreetMap and Wikidata, from the council’s own
list, 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. 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. The two share one marriage law, and it is the law this list belongs to. Scotland licenses the person conducting the ceremony rather than the building, and Northern Ireland approves its venues under its own law and publishes its own list.
Civil ceremonies on approved premises. Churches, chapels and other religious buildings are registered separately. How many there are in each area, and which faiths marry same-sex couples, is on Places of worship.
Approval belongs to the building. It means a ceremony may lawfully take place there. Whether the venue still hosts weddings, and whether it is free on your date, is a question for the venue; whether the approval is current, for the council named on the entry.
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.