The NESSENTIALS

To recap, Mike and I chose to postpone our wedding to not compromise on what we felt this celebration should be, which required us to find a new venue. Thanks to our industrious bridesmaids we had a long-list that Mike and I refined into a short-list.

We were able to arrange a viewing at one of our short-list choices, Core Clapton, first. Core Clapton is a non-profit providing Osteopathic treatment by day, and supports itself financially by hiring out the space in the evenings and on weekends. It is available for all kinds of events, but they know their market well enough by providing wedding-specific information.

I mentioned that some venues the bridesmaids shared were already on my radar, which was the case for Core Clapton – here is their 2019-2020 wedding brochure, with a hire price of £3,000 + VAT (usually 20%), and offering packages for £90 per person. Compared to their 2021-2022 brochure, the package is no longer offered, and the hire price is £3,500 + VAT (again, usually 20%) for Saturdays – our preferred day of the week.

Over 2 wedding seasons an increase of £500, or 16.7% of the previous known hire price (plus obligatory VAT, of course), may seem stark, but we have to acknowledge that the pandemic made hire unfeasible for many months while the space may have still been serving the non-profit. And in real terms, this increase (plus VAT) would be split between Mike and myself, making it far less of a hike as we have a year to save to our new target date.

We arranged a visit, as the venue met our price expectations, and was relatively easy to reach on public transport – the nearest station is, Clapton, on the Overground. It met all other previously mentioned criteria as well, and was available on our new target date. We had face coverings on the whole time, as we needed them for our journey on public transport anyway.

Wedding brochures are very helpful, but the photos in them are always taken professionally, and can involve editing, so it’s important to take photos yourself to support your memories of the venue (although you shouldn’t let poor lighting in the moment, or less skilled shots owed to your equipment put you off either)!

It’s always helpful to have questions prepared in advance that you know you’ll ask, no matter what the venue is, as the venue-specific ones may change. We asked whether there was any particular request around insurance, as wedding insurance is hard to come by, and our previous venue asked us to have public liability up to a certain value included in our wedding insurance.

We also wanted to know about set-up and tear-down (what time would we have access for either, would we be able to drop things off early and leave them later), staffing (is security included in the hire cost, and is the venue contact on hand on the night), if there were any discounts for working with preferred suppliers and whether a license was required if we operated an open bar (no sale of alcohol).

Specific to the venue, we wanted to know about the capacity the outdoor space held, and how food could be served to attendees considering the location of the kitchen and purpose of the different spaces available.

There were some questions that we asked on the spot, but to be transparent with you, we didn’t remember them all, so sent a follow-up by email, which was answered pretty promptly. We were quite impressed with the venue, because of its large space on the top floor, which was a blank canvas to transform into any kind of wedding you can imagine. It also has a lift on property, which is helpful for access to the less mobile. Its non-profit status was also something that appealed to us.

But we weren’t ready to decide with only one viewing under our belt, so we asked for a week to make a decision, as we had another viewing scheduled in that time frame. It seems obvious, but panicking into a decision is not a good idea, even though Mike and I felt the pressure of couples planning weddings who had to postpone, or who got engaged during the pandemic.

In my next post I will be sharing how our second venue viewing went, and what further questions came up in the process of picking a venue. Please subscribe if that’s of interest and you want to follow along, or comment what questions you had for venues when narrowing down choices.