Newbie - how did you chose your venue?

The venue search is what first brought me to hitched, actually.

The first decision: religious or civil

If religious, look at churches, etc; if civil, look at approved sites. In Kent there's a website just for approved civil ceremony locations, so I looked there, too.

Then think budget, but I suggest being open minded before setting it, as you might find you need to put more into venue than the other things.

Then have nosey through nearby places, line up a few visits, and decide what is most important to you to have for a venue.

Wedding - decided to go away together to get married because I didn't want all the show and fuss of first time round. A business associate with far more money than we have has raved about Zanzibar for ages, but cost was always prohibitive. I can't marry in local churches here since I'm divorced, but by going there I can have a C of E wedding (Commonwealth country with an Anglican cathedral).

Reception - we decided we wanted a barn style venue. Hunted high and low, and it turned out the nearest was one about 40miles away. It looked lovely so we booked it. Then we had problems with numbers (we would have been very crowded there) and extra unexpected costs that were being charged. During the planning stages we also moved house. Where we are now, the village hall is like a mini stately home and every time I drove past I thought "would be lovely to have a reception there instead of 40 miles away". Once problems started with venue 1, we contacted the hall and they had a date free, so we booked.

First time I got married it also wasn't hard. I wanted to marry in the family church so booked the nearest stately home for a reception. Then we found out the church wouldn't marry us since my ex husband was divorced, so we had the whole day at the manor house.

For neither wedding have I had to look round loads of places. I think to me the location isn't important as long as it fits the style of wedding (i.e. don't ask me to choose between 2 stately homes, I wouldn't mind!) and is convenient!

Found it by googling a million sites and found out the film 28 Days Later was filmed there! (along with Sense and Sensibility but zombies far more fun!). We walked in and both said: Yes, this is it. First place we went to see, it was love at first sight.

We decided on the type of wedding that we wanted and a rough area that we wanted to get married within, then we emailed lots of venues that we liked the look from their websites to see if they could accomodate what they wanted. If they couldn't then we crossed them off the list, if they could then we went to view them, we saw about 8 in total but none compared to the first place we saw so we went back for a second viewing with my parents, asked stacks more questions and finally booked it. We wanted to be 100% sure because it is a little bit more expensive than we'd hoped but we love it so much.

Firstly we decided the size of the wedding we would have we both only wanted a small intimate wedding OH is from a very small family so i didn't want the guest list to be one sided.

We then started thinking about venues I used to work in high end hotels/events/weddings and other half still does so we could have gone down the DIY route and organise everything ourselves but decided we didn't want the stress and wanted to be able to enjoy our own wedding but that said we wanted a venue we could trust to meet our standards (we didn't want to have any regrets wishing we had organised the day ourselves after all, if the food and service from the venue or suppliers was bad on the day)....We then pondered if we were going to have a formal day i.e full sit down meal etc or keep it casual with a buffet, BBQ, hog roast or similar....we decided we wanted a formal meal so decided we would look at 5 star hotels as these would be able to cater for everything under one roof and should be a safe bet that the food and service would be good.....we then had to decide if we wanted a city or country wedding (we live in London so to stay local or to escape to the country) we trawled the web for venues that suited us both in the city and surrounding country(I probably contacted at least 15 venues that for further information but ruled most of them out) ....it was quite hard finding small function rooms that were not too corporate....we viewed around 5 venues and narrowed it down to a top 3 . We really couldn't decide so we sat down and wrote out pros and cons for each place we found it really helpful....we then ruled out 1 of the 3 as it did not seem as good value as the other 2.. we had a second viewing at our top 2 venues and then made our decision....This whole process took us 8 months and funnily enough the venue we booked was the first venue we saw.

Thanks for your replies,

We have contacted about 20 venues, haven't found one that ticks all the boxes - my favourite is the first one we visited! But it doesn't have accomaodation ☹️

Does anyone know any exclusive use barns style venues in essex with accomaodation?

We are marrying in a church so just needed a venue for our meal/reception.

First venue we saw we did like but it was a bit small and they didn't have our date.

I was then 100% positive I wanted our reception to be at Barnsdale Hall (Rutland Water) and made the appointment to go view, i had my mind set on it.

OH rang me to say he wanted us to go and see another venue before BH and I wasn't at all happy in all honesty as for me my mind was made up, but off we trotted.

Well, the manager who showed us round was soooooo good and really helped me picture all our friends and family there, I fell in love and forgot about the other venue.