A Local Wedding
Jon Watt, Tuesday 24 January 2012
When my friends heard I was getting married in south west London, the general consensus was that this was unusual.
In the quick straw poll that followed, I established that only one of my friends had ever actually been to a wedding in the capital in the ten years or so we’d been in ‘wedding season’ - despite the fact that many of us were born and bred in the city. It seems that the picture of an English wedding only includes a countryside church, a marquee in a garden and a pub called the Lucky Boatman – or whatever it was in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
My wife (cue loud cheer) and I had no such image. We are both from south west London and to marry anywhere else would just not have reflected our backgrounds. My wife’s local church is All Saints, Fulham, so that was easy, but where to have the reception? If there’s one draw-back of a London wedding it’s that there are so many fantastic venues to choose from it’s easy to lose the first couple of months of planning in visiting local venues catering for 100 plus, like Warren House, Hurlingham Club, Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park and Cannizaro House in Wimbledon.
In the end, we opted to keep it all local and booked Fulham Palace in Bishops Park just a few hundred yards along the river from the church. Being able to walk from church to reception was a major factor in the Palace’s favour but more important to us was the versatility of the space. We’d always wanted a winter wedding and had images in our mind of roaring fires, Christmas trees and steaming mulled wine.
The Tudor/Georgian splendour of Fulham Palace offered this in abundance. With its fountain courtyard, panelled Great Hall, spacious Bishop Terrick’s rooms and Chaplain’s Garden marquee in a walled garden, it had something for everyone. The palace is managed by Hammersmith & Fulham Council which employs an on-site events manager to handle the huge volume of functions at the venue each year. The popularity of Fulham Palace is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand you may not be able to get the date you want, but on the other the venue has been tried and tested over the years and staff are enormously experienced – something we only fully appreciated when we started planning in earnest and were thankful to be able to bounce ideas off someone who’s been through it before.
The palace provides its own caterers, but it was up to us to find everything else – and we discovered there are few better places than south London to find it. The abundance of florists, dressmakers, photographers, and cheesemongers – essential for the two-foot-high tower of English cheese (pictured left)! – meant that you could get every service you wanted within a two-mile radius. Anyone who’s been through a wedding will appreciate that having fittings, tastings and browsings in easy reach saves hours in travel and hassle.
In the end, thank to the efforts of everyone involved behind the scenes at the palace and in front of the camera, the wedding went off without a hitch – well, that is if you don’t count the Best Man forgetting the rings as a hitch. But we had to have a bit of Four Weddings in there!
