Description

Wedding Advice: Wedding Experts - The A to Z of holding your wedding in a registry office.

Transcript

Well I’m the Superintendent Registrar and I work for Westminster City Council. I’m standing here in the registrar office which is in Westminster Council House or commonly known as The Old Man of the Town Hall. This used to be known as Marilyn Registrar Office at the time when there were three registrar offices in the bureau, there was one in Paddington, one in Westminster, and one here. The other two closed down and then we all came together in this one building, so people still know it as Marilyn Registrar Office but officially it’s Westminster Registrar Office. We’re probably the busiest registrants in London, and we conduct over 1500 weddings here every year. Plus we also go out to a number of approved premises which are also licensed to hold weddings in Westminster, so we have over a hundred venues that you can choose to be married at. There are certain restrictions in terms of what choice of music you can have, what type of readings you could have, it must be purely non-religious. But obviously, we will go all out to ensure that the couple get, more or less what they want, obviously there is something you just have to say no to. We have four rooms here that people can choose to have their ceremony in. Two of them are large, we are standing in the purple room which sits 80 people and has lovely long aisle for the bride to walk down if she wishes to do that. We also have our reception room which is a large wood paneled room which sits 70 people; it’s quite a lot of standing room. And then we have two smaller rooms for the more intimate wedding. The blue room sits up to 30, and the yellow room, 20, so it’s a slightly more intimate wedding. And of course, a lot of couples just bring two witnesses so we can range from weddings having two guests right up to 102, if that’s what people choose. This is our blue marriage room, this room sits 30. It’s quite a formal set-up, the bride and groom sit with the witnesses in front of a table, registrants stand behind the table and then they move to across to sign the registers the end. This room was host to the famous marriage of Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith a few years ago, they’re still together. Patsy and Leam also got married in here but unfortunately they’re not still together but it’s seen a variety of celebrities marry in here over the years. I should imagine a lot of people do think that registrars are quite dowdy and perhaps can be a bit light with inspirational ceremony but we’re for couples choices of wording, they can have readings, poetry readings, music, now for example here if the bride wants to walk down the aisle either she can choose a CD or maybe we’ve had lots of occasions where a string quartets have come along and played at weddings, we’ve had bag pipes, we’ve had pipers outside, piping in and out, so it’s becoming a much more 21st century service now. I think people are getting to realize that registrant weddings aren’t quite the dowdy affair it used to be. This is our yellow room it’s a slightly less formal set-up. The ceremonies conducted informally in front of the fireplace: bride, groom, registrar standing in front of them. We’ve had a few celebrities marry in here as well, most recently, I think John Hearth, last year, so it’s a very popular room because it’s less formal and it’s quite small and intimate. You might think this was called the green room but it’s not, it’s called the Lord Mayor’s Retiring Room and it’s a waiting room for couple’s to wait for their guest before the ceremony begins, it’s an ideal opportunity for taking photographs because I think, I believe it’s the prettiest room that we have. Of course, the beauty of this building is there’s lots of areas for taking photographs, you got all the marble staircases, you’ve got both sides, you can sit on the seat and have your photograph taken with your partner and the long corridor is just beautiful especially when the sun streams into the windows. It’s a really lovely place.