Start looking for your dream Wedding Venue

I mentioned in my introductory post the importance of securing your dream wedding venue as soon as possible after your engagement. The competition is high and people do book up venues sometimes two to three years in advance; so, I’ve put together a little guide to help you get started and organised in forming the foundation of your big day.

Although Ronan and I didn’t start planning our wedding until January 2019, we started searching for our dream venue in May 2018, which we didn’t find and secure until September 2018 for the following October 2019. The process can be a little longer than anticipated, depending on your requirements, but allowed us to relax a little once we nailed it and this was a huge weight off our shoulders.

Ronan is Irish Catholic and I am British Indian of Church of England denomination, so a Christian wedding at my home church in the Parish of New Hinksey was a no brainer. I am a real Oxfordshire home girl; my family and my home are my everything and I have always sought after the big church wedding with all my friends and family present. St John the Evangelist church bears a huge significance to my life and the life of my family. My granddad immigrated to Oxford from India in the 1960s as a priest, and has remained in St John’s church ever since. My dad and his seven brothers and sisters grew up in the Parish, and I have been a part of many significant family events in the church over the years, including christenings, confirmations, weddings, my grandparent’s renewal of vows, and of course my own christening and confirmation. I needed to get married here! As a result, the church ceremony aspect of our wedding had sort of resolved itself; since we are regular Sunday worshippers the procedure was rather informal with our priest, who told us to secure the venue and the church would simply follow.

It was quite simple then: book the venue and then the church, and we’re ready to go!

Now, being an Indian Irish, mixed wedding, our main priority was striking a balance between the two cultures and creating a fusion. With that in mind, we proceeded to make the following list of the basic requirements from our venue before I began hunting:

1. Accommodating 200 guests

We began by realistically putting together a list of the number of guests we would be expecting from both sides. The only problem was that not many venues around Oxfordshire catered to this large number of guests; 200, however, is rather a small number for both an Indian and an Irish wedding!

2. Self-catering for Indian food/in-house catering for Indian food

Food has to be one of the most, if not THE most important part of the wedding. Again, the difficulty here was finding the right venue that allowed us to bring our own caterers, as the majority of venues do not cater to in-house Indian food. However, there is also only a very small number of venues that allow external caterers.

3. In the countryside of Oxfordshire, not too far away from the church

Ronan is an Irish country boy working in London whose heart will always belong in the country, and I have to admit, a piece of mine is always buried deep in the countryside too. There really were no disagreements with this one as we both instantly knew we were looking for a venue as far away from the city as possible but not too far from church.

As you can guess, these requirements limited us down to only a select few and made research even more difficult and long-winded. But, whatever your requirements, once you have the most important aspects down, you can direct your research towards these venues which helps in narrowing them down from the outset.

Our final requirement was:

4. The budget.

Although we decided on a guideline to follow from the beginning, we never really strictly came up with a budget for the venue and were quite flexible with our budget in general, chopping and changing as we went along. This is primarily because both Ronan and I had been together for such a short while before getting engaged, that we had not actually had the time to save up enough together. But, with a little hard work over 12 months, we managed to include pretty much everything we wanted AND secured the dream venue! Find out how we managed to do this later.

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