Booking a registrar

If personality etc is important to you then you need to book a celebrant and have the legal part done separately.

If you combine the wedding with the legal part (as is normal for a register office wedding) you don't get any say in the choice of registrar. You won't even get to meet them until about 10 min before the ceremony!

Thank you. So can the celebrant and the legal part been done on the same day or not? We aren't looking for someone whose a laugh a minute but someone who is warm and light hearted and not sour faced would be great lol. Xx

You need to contact your local register office (plus the one local to your venue if it's in a different county/area).

You can book the register office for a 9am slot on the day of your wedding so that you can get the legal bit out of the way first (if going down the celebrant route), just bear in mind timings for getting ready for the rest of your day & witnesses, etc. Some people who go down this route, do the legal bit on a different day beforehand.

Best to check with your local register office x

You book your registrar through the registry office local to your venue. You don't get a choice, and may or may not meet them beforehand - we had a planning meeting about a month before, and met them then, but not everywhere does this. I don't think they'd be a wedding registrar if they were going to be "sour faced," but some do definitely seem to read the crowd better than others. Some offices will only take bookings less than a year before the date, but others will allow you to provisionally book further in advance, so get in touch and check, popular dates, especially weekends, get booked up fast!

If you want to have a choice of celebrant and arrange the legal bits separately, you could have a brief registry office legal ceremony either earlier in the day or on another day entirely. You could get them to come out to the venue to do it and have a celebrant too, but you will probably not be allowed to have them in the same place at the same time, and registrars' "call-out" fees are much higher than a registry office ceremony.

Thanks for your advice ladies. I'll give the registry office a call today and see what they advice about booking etc xx