Plot every licensed wedding venue in England and Wales on one map and it looks nothing like a map of where people live. Central London is thick with them, as you would expect. So are the South Hams, the Cotswolds and the Lake District, while some of the larger towns of the Midlands barely show up at all.
Where you live shapes how much choice you have, how far your guests will travel, and how hard you will have to fight for a Saturday in August. This is the wedding map of England and Wales, from the busiest town halls to the quietest valleys, finishing with a tour of every region.
Seven weddings in ten
Until the Marriage Act 1994, a civil wedding in England and Wales meant the register office. The Act let councils approve hotels, stately homes and other buildings for ceremonies, and three decades on, licensed venues are where most couples marry.
In 2023 they hosted more than 165,000 weddings, more than seven in every ten marriages that year. That averages about 23 a venue, or more than 450 a day, though the weddings are anything but evenly spread.
Where the venues cluster
No council area has more licensed venues than Westminster. More than 200 of them are packed into its 22 square kilometres: the Ritz, the Savoy and Claridge’s, the clubs of Pall Mall, Soho’s members’ clubs and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Within a kilometre of Piccadilly Circus there are more than 90.
North Yorkshire runs it close, with 204 venues spread across a county more than 350 times the size, and Cornwall comes third. In Wales, Powys leads, and its 73 venues are spread across a quarter of the country.
For all that choice, Westminster’s venues are quieter than most. In 2023 they held about 14 weddings each, against a national average of about 23.
Where couples have the most choice
Count venues against residents and the picture changes. The most generous corner of England and Wales is the South Hams in Devon, the coast and farmland around Dartmouth, Salcombe and Totnes, with a licensed venue for every 1,700 or so residents. West Devon, next door, and Powys, in mid Wales, come next.
The City of London, the Isles of Scilly and Westminster score higher still, but that says more about how few people live among their venues than about choice. Every council area’s figure is on the rankings page, and the choice lookup shows how your own area compares.
At the other end, Nuneaton and Bedworth in Warwickshire has two venues for more than 144,000 people. The South Hams has more than 40 times its choice.
Cities have the people, the countryside has the venues
Birmingham, home to 1.2 million people, has 32 licensed venues. West Devon, with fewer than 60,000 residents, has 34.
Leeds and the South Hams have 55 each, though Leeds has nine times the population, and the London borough of Barnet has fewer venues than Rutland, England’s smallest historic county, with about ten times its population.
The pattern holds across the board. The most rural fifth of council areas has about three times as many venues per resident as the most built-up fifth. Cities have the people; the countryside has the halls, barns and views that people travel for, so a city couple set on a country wedding will be heading out of town, and so will most of their guests.
The busiest venues and the quietest
In 2023 the average licensed venue held about 23 weddings. In Islington the figure was about 95: its 19 venues, the town hall on Upper Street among them, held more than 1,800 weddings between them.
Cross the boundary into the City of London and the picture flips. Its 37 venues, from the Guildhall and the Inner Temple to the ancient halls of the Skinners, Ironmongers and Watermen, shared fewer than 100 weddings all year, which makes an Islington venue more than 35 times busier than one in the Square Mile.
The busy end of the table belongs to the capital: nine of the ten busiest are London boroughs, among them Havering, Brent and Barnet, where a handful of venues serve hundreds of thousands of people. If your heart is set on a popular town hall on a summer Saturday, book early.
Wales: more room, quieter diaries
Wales has two-thirds more venues per head than England: about 19 for every 100,000 people, against 11 in England.
Its venues are quieter too. A Welsh venue held about 13 weddings in 2023, an English one about 23, which is good news for anyone hunting for a Saturday. Ceredigion, on the west coast, has the quietest venues anywhere outside the City of London, at about five weddings a year each.
The wedding calendar
August is the wedding month. In 2023, one in seven marriages in England and Wales took place in August, and more than four in ten on a Saturday, according to the Office for National Statistics. The single busiest day was Saturday 2 September, with more than 3,200 weddings, about five times an ordinary day. That broke the pattern: in recent years the crown had gone to a Saturday in July.
January is the quiet month, with fewer than three weddings in every hundred, and Christmas Day and Boxing Day are the least popular days of the year. If your date is flexible, a winter weekday is where the diaries have the most room, and in the quieter corners of Wales and the South West there is room all year round.
A tour of the regions
Every region has its own character, from the Lake District’s lakeside hotels to the castles of Wales. Here is what each one does best, from Northumberland to Cornwall, with a link to its full list of areas.
The North East
The North East has fewer licensed venues than any other region, fewer than 300, and some of the best known. Alnwick Castle, which stood in for Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter films, is one; Bamburgh Castle, on its crag of black volcanic rock above the beach, is another. Both are in Northumberland, which has more venues and more choice per head than anywhere else in the region, and where Kielder Waterside sits beside the largest artificial lake in the UK by capacity.
In County Durham, couples marry at Durham Castle, begun under William the Conqueror and home to a university college since 1837, and at Beamish, the open-air museum of the North East’s industrial past.
The North West
Hotels carry the North West: about three venues in ten are hotels, a higher share than in any other region. In the Lake District, Westmorland and Furness has more choice per head than anywhere else in the region, and its list runs from lakeside hotels on Windermere to Rydal Mount, William Wordsworth’s home from 1813 until his death, and Brantwood, John Ruskin’s house above Coniston Water.
Cheshire East has the most venues in the region, 118, from the parkland of Tatton to Jodrell Bank, the radio observatory that became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019.
Yorkshire and the Humber
About one in three venues in Yorkshire and the Humber is in North Yorkshire, which has more than 200, more than any council area in England and Wales bar Westminster. They run from Skipton Castle and the Spa at Scarborough to the Tan Hill Inn, 528 metres up on the northern edge of the Yorkshire Dales and the highest inn in the British Isles.
Leeds adds Harewood House, and the region’s towns keep their venues busy. In Barnsley, venues held about 46 weddings each in 2023, twice the national average.
The East Midlands
The East Midlands has fewer venues per head than most regions, but they work hard: about 27 weddings each in 2023, against 23 nationally. In the Peak District, Derbyshire Dales is among the ten best-supplied council areas in England and Wales, with a list that includes Chatsworth House, which played Pemberley in the 2005 film of Pride & Prejudice.
In Lincolnshire, East Lindsey runs from the Wolds to the coast at Skegness, and includes the Petwood Hotel in Woodhall Spa, the wartime officers’ mess of the Dambusters’ 617 Squadron. The gaps are in the towns: Ashfield, in Nottinghamshire, has two venues for more than 130,000 people.
The West Midlands
The West Midlands region has fewer venues per head than any other, and its towns are the reason: Cannock Chase and Tamworth, in Staffordshire, have two each. Head west and the picture changes. Herefordshire has the most choice per head in the region, with Eastnor Castle, built between 1811 and 1820 to look like a medieval fortress, and Hampton Court Castle, begun in 1427 and no relation to the palace.
Shropshire has the most venues, Ludlow Castle among them, and in Stratford-on-Avon you can marry at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. The busiest venues are in Dudley, at about 67 weddings each a year, three times the national average.
Wales
Wales has about one in twelve of the licensed venues in England and Wales but one in five of the castles. Caerphilly, the largest castle in Wales, is among them, and so is Cardigan Castle, where the first recorded eisteddfod was held in 1176. Look out, too, for Plas, the Welsh word for a mansion or hall, in more than 20 venue names.
Powys has the most venues in Wales and the most choice per head, from Craig-y-Nos Castle, where the opera singer Adelina Patti built her own private theatre, to Hay Castle in Hay-on-Wye, the town of books. Monmouthshire and Denbighshire come next for choice.
The East of England
More venues in the East of England are called Hall, House or Manor than in any other region, and about one in five is a hotel. Barns and farms make up about one in ten. North Norfolk has the most choice per head, with Holkham Hall, one of England’s finest Palladian houses, near Wells-next-the-Sea.
East Suffolk has the most venues, among them Snape Maltings, the Victorian maltings on the River Alde where Benjamin Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival is now held. And near Stamford, inside the Peterborough boundary, is Burghley House, built for Elizabeth I’s Lord High Treasurer, William Cecil.
London
London has more than 800 licensed venues, but spread across more than nine million people that is fewer per head than any region bar the West Midlands, and a quarter of them are in Westminster. What the rest of the capital lacks in numbers it makes up in landmarks: you can marry at the Tower of London, at Shakespeare’s Globe, and high above the river at The View from the Shard.
Camden has two of the four Inns of Court, Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn, and Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath. In Greenwich, couples marry at the Royal Observatory, where the Prime Meridian runs, and beneath Sir James Thornhill’s ceiling in the Painted Hall.
The South East
The South East has more than 1,100 venues, more than any region but the South West. On the Isle of Wight, 44 venues for about 140,000 islanders give couples more choice per head than anywhere else in the region, among them Osborne, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s summer home, and the sailing clubs of Cowes and Bembridge.
On the mainland, Blenheim Palace, where Winston Churchill was born, and Hever Castle, Anne Boleyn’s childhood home, both hold weddings. Rother, the corner of East Sussex around Rye, Battle and Bexhill, comes second for choice.
The South West
The South West is where the map is fullest. It has more licensed venues than any other region, about 1,200, and more per head, and four of the five council areas with the most choice are here once Scilly and central London are set aside. Cornwall has more venues than any council area bar Westminster and North Yorkshire, the Eden Project among them, whose rainforest dome is one of the largest indoor rainforests in the world.
Outside Devon, the most choice is in the Cotswold district, around Cirencester and Stow-on-the-Wold. Nearby Sudeley Castle is the one privately owned castle in the world with a queen of England, Catherine Parr, buried in its grounds, and off the South Devon coast, Burgh Island Hotel, reached by sea tractor at high tide, inspired two Agatha Christie novels. The venues here are quieter than most, at about 16 weddings each in 2023.
Find your corner of the map
To see what is licensed near you, search the map by postcode or town, or browse every council area. For the lighter side of the list, from the favourite venue name to the golf clubs and libraries that hold weddings, read the surprising facts, and for caves, lighthouses and warships, the unusual venues.