If you don’t want your wedding to feel like you have been processed on a conveyor belt – you’ll already know that a faceless hotel wedding package is not for you…
A marquee is a great alternative (if you can find a place to site it), but they can get expensive what with furniture, a bar, a catering tent, power, toilets etc. etc. to consider, as well as the huge job that will fall to you of coordinating all those suppliers and make it all come together into a seamless whole for a single day.
So, how about hiring a village hall – they no longer smell of cabbage and boy scouts, and with the last few years of significant lottery funding, there are now a mass of modern, well-equipped, clean, even stylish village halls in some wonderful parts of the country.
The advantages of a village hall wedding are twofold, first must be the price. They are often very cheap to hire. A close second then is ease; they always have toilets, furniture and parking – some even have commercial kitchens for your caterer to use, or if not a committee room can often be adapted easily with tables and mobile turbo ovens to create a ‘commercial’ kitchen able to supply fabulous food to all your guests… having all these facilities on site also makes them even cheaper of course.
If the interior is a little lacking in atmosphere, you can hire a venue dresser to line the entire space and transform it into what looks like the inside of a marquee (or a Bedouin tent!). We once did a wedding in a church hall and the couple used Brian Ferry’s set designer to make the place look like a hi-tech club with video screens and the whole thing.
Finding a village hall is easier than it used to be with the useful little website www.hallshire.com and for everything else there’s the specialist resources website at www.independent-weddings.co.uk – which also lists village halls that really work for weddings in the West Midlands, as well as venue dressers who know how to transform your venue.
Going down the village hall route for your wedding will save you stress – – and all the money you would otherwise have to spend on essentials means you have precious resources to put instead into things that are a little more important to you, like the wedding food, flowers or your honeymoon.
A great example of the type of hall we mean is Whiston Village Hall. High on the Staffordshire Moorlands, it has all you could need at a very reasonable cost indeed… see the entry on www.independent-weddings.co.uk
Whiston Village Hall
What and Where. In the rolling hills between Cheadle and Ashbourne is the compact village of Whiston, and just on the fringes of the village, perched on the edge of a magnificent green valley is their amazing village hall. It’s a huge modern structure built into the hillside with masses of parking, a vast main hall, committee rooms (perfect for drinks if it’s wet outside), a bar and a kitchen.
Who. To book the hall call 01538 266711 or e-mail bookings@whistonvillagehall.co.uk
Web: Great modern website at www.whistonvillagehall.co.uk