Most couples start with a picture in their head: a barn strung with lights, a castle on a hill, the town hall steps. Put all 7,300-plus licensed venues in England and Wales side by side, though, and their names start to tell stories of their own.
The favourite venue name is not the one you would guess, swans outnumber lions, and one seafront road in Brighton has eleven venues to itself. Here are fifteen facts worth repeating at the hen do.
1. About one in four venues is a hotel
Hotel is the most common word in a licensed venue’s name, turning up in more than 1,600 of them, and about one in four venues is a hotel of some kind, from country-house spas to city-centre towers. The appeal is plain: the ceremony, the wedding breakfast and the bedrooms sit under one roof.
The chains are well represented. More than 60 venues carry a Hilton name, enough to go to a wedding in a different one every week for more than a year. After Hotel, the words that appear most often are Hall, House, Club, Park and Manor. Read in order, they sketch the English wedding pretty well.
2. Set aside ‘The’, and the favourite first word is ‘Old’
More than 100 venue names begin with Old, or The Old, and together they read like a tour of the English village and market town: twelve Old Rectories, eight Old Schools, five Old Vicarages and five Old Town Halls.
Then come the one-offs, each a former life in two words: the Old Milking Parlour, the Old Cow Shed, the Old Tollgate, the Old Timber Store, the Old Bakery and the Old Picture House. Whatever a building used to do, somebody now gets married in it.
3. The most common venue name is Town Hall
Town Hall is the name on 30 licensed venues, with or without a “The”, and the words appear in more than 170 venue names in all. The Guildhall comes a close second, with 25, from Exeter and Worcester to Windsor, where the Guildhall hosted the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles in April 2005 and Elton John’s civil partnership that December.
Further down the list of favourites are ten Royal Hotels, nine Hotels du Vin and six venues that go by the plain name of The Ceremony Room.
4. The favourite animal is the swan
The swan appears in 26 venue names, from the White Swan to the Swan at Hay, a nose ahead of the 22 Red, White, Golden and Black Lions. Then come the White Harts, a hart being a male red deer, and after them the rest of the pub-sign menagerie: Black and White Horses, Foxes and Hounds, Bears and Bulls.
The odder entries include a Snooty Fox in Pembrokeshire, a Tartan Fox in Cornwall, the Crazy Bear in Oxfordshire, a Pink Pig and a Peppered Pig, six hotels that call themselves The Pig, nine Dragons and, in Powys, a Giraffe Shed.
5. The longest name runs to nine words, the shortest to four letters
The longest belongs to a hotel in Croydon: the London Croydon Aerodrome Hotel Signature Collection by Best Western, a mouthful for a building with a story. It opened in 1928 beside Croydon Airport, then Britain’s main international airport, as the world’s first airport hotel, and Amy Johnson spent the night there before her record-breaking flight to Australia.
At the other end are six names of four letters: Home, Hush, Inox, Lost, Lula and Plau. Home turns up twice, in Manchester and on the Wirral.
6. More than 100 castles hold weddings, and one of them floats
Leave aside the pubs and hotels that borrowed the word, and more than 100 castles are licensed for ceremonies. They run from Warwick Castle and Leeds Castle (which is in Kent, not Yorkshire) to Highclere, better known to television audiences as Downton Abbey. For something grander still, Hampton Court Palace and Kensington Palace are licensed too.
Not every one of them would survive a siege. Castle Howard in North Yorkshire, where both screen versions of Brideshead Revisited were filmed, is a baroque country house that took the name without the battlements. And there are two Tattershall Castles: one a 15th-century brick castle in Lincolnshire, the other a 1930s paddle steamer that once ferried passengers across the Humber and is now moored on the Thames at Victoria Embankment.
7. In the countryside, about one in nine venues is a barn
Across England and Wales, about one in fifteen licensed venues has a barn or a farm in its name. In the most rural fifth of council areas that rises to about one in nine; in the most built-up fifth it is fewer than one in a hundred.
The barn capital is Mid Devon, where more than one venue in four has a barn or a farm in its name. There are six venues called The Great Barn, and more than ten tithe barns, built to store the tenth of each harvest once owed to the church.
8. More than 20 vineyards are licensed for weddings
You can marry among the vines at more than 20 vineyards and wine estates. Denbies, near Dorking, is the largest vineyard in England, with more than a tenth of all the vines planted in the UK. Most of the rest are in the south, but they reach as far north as Little Wolds Vineyard in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and Wales has three.
Beer and gin have their own, with eleven breweries and distilleries. Shepherd Neame in Faversham, which claims to be Britain’s oldest brewer, is one; Hook Norton in Oxfordshire, a Victorian tower brewery that still delivers by horse-drawn dray in its village, is another. At Laverstoke Mill in Hampshire, Bombay Sapphire grows its gin botanicals in two glasshouses designed by Thomas Heatherwick, and Newcastle has three breweries of its own.
9. More than 200 golf clubs and hotels hold weddings
For couples who met on the fairway, or whose guests would rather be on one, more than 200 venues with golf in the name are licensed. Two have hosted the Ryder Cup: The Belfry, in Warwickshire, four times, more than any other venue in the world, and the Celtic Manor Resort, near Newport, in 2010. Wentworth, in Surrey, held the 1926 match between Britain and the United States that led to it.
The golfing heartland, by this count, is Cheshire East, with seven golf venues. And some clubs have branched out further still: Fairfield, in Tameside, is a golf and sailing club.
10. More than 30 football clubs are licensed for weddings
Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester City and Everton can all host a ceremony, and so can Tranmere Rovers, Morecambe and Sutton United. The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has its own licence, as does Twickenham for rugby fans and Lord’s for cricket lovers, one of fifteen cricket clubs that hold weddings.
Racing fans can choose from 25 racecourses, Ascot, Aintree, Epsom Downs and York among them, and Rugby School, the birthplace of rugby football, is licensed too. For a couple who met on the terraces or at the rails, the photographs rather take care of themselves.
11. Cambridge has 15 licensed college venues; Oxford has four
In the Oxford and Cambridge rivalry, this round goes to the Light Blues. Christ’s, Jesus, Magdalene, Pembroke, Queens’ and Trinity Hall are among the Cambridge colleges licensed for ceremonies, and Gonville and Caius has two venues of its own.
Oxford answers with Merton, St Edmund Hall, St Hilda’s and Wolfson. Either way, it is one of the few ways to spend your wedding day inside a college without having sat an exam to get there.
12. You can marry in 30 libraries
Oxford’s consolation for losing the college count is the Bodleian, founded by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1602 and one of the oldest libraries in Europe. The Portico Library in Manchester, opened in 1806, is where its first secretary, Peter Mark Roget, began work on his thesaurus, and the Leeds Library, founded in 1768, is the oldest surviving subscription library of its kind in the UK.
The National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth is licensed too, and so are town libraries from Fulham to Worthing. A room lined with books turns out to suit a quiet ceremony very well.
13. One Brighton road has eleven licensed venues
Kings Road, which runs along Brighton’s seafront, has eleven licensed venues, more than a quarter of the council areas in England and Wales can muster. They include the Old Ship, a hotel since before 1600 and once owned by Nicholas Tettersell, whose boat carried Charles II to France in 1651; the Metropole, by the Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse; the seafront bandstand; and the 162-metre i360 observation tower.
Bournemouth’s East Overcliff Drive has seven hotels along the clifftop, and the Bath Road beside Heathrow has seven venues, six of them hotels, lined up for the airport trade.
14. One town hall can host a thousand ceremonies a year
Leicester Town Hall holds around a thousand marriage and civil partnership ceremonies a year, according to the city council, the equivalent of about 20 a week.
The most famous of them all is the Old Marylebone Town Hall, home of Westminster’s register office. Paul McCartney married there twice, in 1969 and again in 2011, Ringo Starr married Barbara Bach there in 1981, and Liam Gallagher has married there twice as well.
15. You can marry anywhere from the Scottish border to the Isles of Scilly
The most northerly licensed venue is the Marshall Meadows hotel, outside Berwick-upon-Tweed, on the last stretch of English coast before Northumberland gives way to Scotland. The most southerly and most westerly are both on St Mary’s in the Isles of Scilly: the Porthcressa Beachside Room, and the Star Castle Hotel, an eight-pointed fort built on the orders of Elizabeth I in 1593.
The most easterly is the Royal Norfolk and Suffolk Yacht Club in Lowestoft, the town that holds Ness Point, the easternmost tip of Britain. From the top of the map to the bottom is more than 700 kilometres as the crow flies, and every licensed venue in between is a legal place to say your vows.
Where to go from here
The oddest corners, from caves and lighthouses to warships and a Concorde, have a feature of their own in the unusual venues article. For the bigger picture, from where couples have the most choice to the busiest Saturday of the year, read the wedding map of England and Wales.
To see what is licensed near you, search by postcode or town or browse every council area.