Having watched a great many wedding days start from the first car arriving to the last song played, I can tell you that what changes the shape of a day more than anything else is where the ceremony happens and what time it starts.

The three options, and what each one really involves

A church ceremony

If you are marrying in a Church of England church, your banns will usually be read out on three Sundays during the three months before the wedding, which takes the place of giving notice at a register office. The service itself tends to run from about half an hour to an hour, with around forty-five minutes being the average. Hymns, readings and a communion service all add to that, so advisable to ask your Vicar how long the service could take.

What couples forget is that the service finishing is not the same as the church being finished with you. There is the signing of the register, the photographs at the door, the confetti, and then the long business of everybody talking to relatives they have not seen in years. Half an hour from the last hymn to the first car leaving is realistic, and I have often seen it take much longer.

A register office ceremony

A register office ceremony is short by design. Here in the Royal Borough of Greenwich, ceremonies at Woolwich Town Hall last up to thirty minutes, and you choose between the register office itself, which holds the two of you and your two witnesses and nobody else, the Edwardian Room, which holds you and thirty-six guests, or Victoria Hall, which holds you and a hundred and twenty. Photographers, videographers, musicians and children all count towards those numbers, including your own children.

You will need to give notice at your local register office at least twenty-nine days before the ceremony, having lived in that district for the previous seven days, and the notice then stands for twelve months. A civil ceremony cannot contain anything religious, so no hymns and no readings with religious content, and the registrar will agree the wording with you beforehand. There can be a wait of six months or more for a booking at Woolwich, so check the diary there before you fix anything else in place.

A ceremony at the venue

The third option is to have the registrar come to you. Tudor Barn Eltham is licensed for civil ceremonies inside the Tudor Gallery, which seats up to 180, and outdoors on the front lawn between April and September; outdoor civil ceremonies at licensed venues having been made permanent in England and Wales since April 2022. The registrar arrives, conducts the ceremony and leaves, and your guests never get back into their cars. If you would like the fuller picture of how a day here runs, I have written about that in an article titled What to Expect on Your Wedding Day at Tudor Barn Eltham.

The part almost everybody underestimates

Moving forty, or eighty, or a hundred and sixty people from one building to another is not a ten-minute job, however close the two places are. Your guests have to say their goodbyes, find their cars, work out where they are going, get through the traffic, park at the other end and walk in, and only then do they pick up a drink.

For a journey of fifteen minutes, I would allow forty-five minutes from the last guest leaving the church to the last guest holding a glass at the venue, and an hour is safer.

There is one more thing that catches people out, and it applies wherever your civil ceremony takes place. The registrar must interview each of you privately before the ceremony can begin, which is a legal requirement rather than a formality, so you need to arrive fifteen to thirty minutes before your slot. Registrars have other couples booked after you, and if you are late your ceremony may not be able to go ahead that day at all.

To save time and for your guest’s convenience a lot of couples opt to book a coach (or coaches depending on the size of the guest list), so that guests arrive at the same time and don’t have to worry about parking, cars, relying on public transport etc. Yes, this is an additional cost to the couple, but it is worth considering if you want your day to run smoothy and on time.

What a later start actually costs you

Here is the piece I really want you to take away, and it’s an important one. Your finish time does not move; a wedding here finishes at midnight, and midnight arrives whether your ceremony was at one o'clock or at four. Every half hour you push the ceremony back is half an hour taken off the end of your evening, and the end of the evening is the dancing!

Let me show you two days with the same number of guests, the same menu and the same band.

A two o'clock ceremony at the venue

12.00  Guests arrive for pre ceremony bar with guests seating at 13.30

14.00  Ceremony

14.30  Drinks reception

16.00  Wedding Breakfast

18.00  Speeches

19.00  Evening guests arrive

19.30  Cake cutting into first dance

That gives you four hours and 45 minutes of dancing.

A two o'clock church ceremony, fifteen minutes away

13.30  Guests seated at the church

14.00  Service

15.00  Register, photographs, confetti

15.30  Guests begin travelling

16.15  Drinks reception and group photographs

18.00  Wedding breakfast

20.00  Speeches

21.00  Evening guests’ arrival

21.30  First dance

That gives you just under three hours of dancing, and your evening guests having to arrive at 9.00pm or at 8.00pm and then stand and wait for the speeches to finish

Move that church ceremony to three o'clock and the first dance lands somewhere near ten, which leaves you two hours. Move it to half past three, which is not an unusual slot to be offered, and you are looking at cutting the speeches or the meal to get anybody onto the dance floor at all. None of this makes an offsite ceremony the wrong choice. It simply means that when you are speaking to your church or desired registry office that you consider this before deciding on the time of your ceremony. This is much more common that anyone realises and the reason why I wanted to write this article

A late ceremony takes your daylight as well. A two o'clock church wedding in November means the photographs outside are taken in the dark, and there is nothing your photographer can do about that.

If your heart is set on a church or a register office

Plenty of our couples marry at their own church and come to us afterwards, and those days are lovely, so here is what I would ask you to do.

Ask for the earliest ceremony slot you can get rather than the one which sounds civilised, because midday or one o'clock gives you back the whole of your evening. Send your guests written directions and parking information with the invitation and give them the postcode for your venue. Ask your photographer to take the large group shots at the church while everybody is still in one place. If the day is running behind by the time you sit down, ask your venue to leave the dessert plates down on the tables and start the speeches as soon as the last table has been served.

Above all, ask whoever is running your venue to build you an honest schedule before you commit to a ceremony time. We do this for every couple who books with us, and it is one of the questions worth asking wherever you are looking, alongside the others I have set out in Top 10 Questions to Ask When Choosing a Wedding Venue.

We offer our couples two different hire options when they opt to get married offsite, our full day exclusive hire which is from 10am until Midnight and can be booked 2 years in advance, or our reception only package which is from 4pm until midnight (Fridays and Saturdays only) and can be booked 6 months in advance.

If you would like us to sit down and work out what your day would look like with your ceremony at a particular time, either in a church or at a registry office, please do get in touch with me on suzie.bailey@tudorbarneltham.co.uk.