Wedding day timeline - confused!

I would definately go for 2.30pm. 2.5 hours is a long time to wait around. We are having ceremony at 2 then sitting down at 4 and I still think this is a little too long!

We are having a 2pm wedding and 5.30 sit down with canapés from 3.45pm but we are having a church wedding which will be an hour and then photographs and then a 20minute car journey. so people won't arrive at our venue until 3.30 at the earliest so they will have 1.5hour wait, which I think is long enough, even with canapés, we may push it back to 5.30 for more mingles time for us but not decided yet. So in answer to your question I'd say 2.30.

If you had a squillion guests and lots and lots of groups to be photographed after the ceremony, you would probably need all the time you can muster. But as you have a more intimate gathering, you may well find that 2.30 is a better time, without you being rushed to get through the photos afterwards.

You will find that the time flies by anyway, but with no need to travel between venues or go through a list of 200 guests to be mingled with and photographed, I think that 2 hours is ample.

If you're only having 34 guests I would probably go with 2.30pm.

If you are getting married on a Saturday though I wouldn't hold off booking the registrar. We booked our registrar 18 months beforehand and got the last slot for the time we wanted (2pm).

We got married at 1:30, and had dinner at 4. We actually found that because we travelled down the road in the car (literally a couple of mins away) for a few photos of just us, we were really rushed! I wish we'd gone for more time between, although I do think our guests would probably have got bored. We had about 8 months between getting engaged and getting married, and some times weren't available, so don't hang around too long! You can always push your dinner back a little, but once the registrar is gone, it's gone. Good luck!

I'd go for 2.30pm personally. We're getting married at 4pm and aiming to get people sat down for food by 6pm. I think 2.5 hours in between might be too long as with a small guest list photographs are unlikely to take more than about an hour unless you are off tramping around the grounds for ages! I'd be worried my guests might get a little frustrated hanging around for over 2 hours. Then again, one advantage of having a small intimate wedding is that (I assume) your guests will probably mostly know each other well and might be comfortable hanging out and chatting informally.

Like others have said, I'd look to book the registrar sooner rather than later as the prime time slots go really quickly, we got the last 2pm slot when we booked it 11 months in advance.

As for timings, yes I would agree as it's a more intimate number I'd go for the 2.30pm slot.

Have you spoken to the registry office? We had planned our wedding for 1:30pm but the registrars only did services at 12, 2pm and 4pm so we had to go for the 2pm slot. This was booking over a year in advance too.

Best to give them a call, you might find that the decision is made for you.

Canapés and bar sounds like a good idea to plug the gap and you have plenty of time to get some great photo shots in ?

Hi

Thanks so much for the replies! Having read through them all, it certainly seems like the general consensus is 2.30pm for the ceremony. And after going through the timings in more detail, it does look like that'd give us ample time, given that we've only got a small number of guests. It's not as though they'd take very long to round up for group shots etc!

We did get in touch with the registrar earlier in the week to get a feel for availability, and at that point we were told the afternoon of our preferred day wouldn't be a problem. I think because it's a Friday in April, the demand isn't so high. However, we're now trying to get back in touch to properly book that slot, but are having no joy getting hold of the registrar. And I'm getting paranoid someone else might have got in there first! We'll keep trying anyway. A couple of people have mentioned that their registrar only did specific times during the day, and to be honest that had never occurred to me - I (perhaps naively) just assumed you could pick whatever time you like, as long as it was free. If not, then as some have said, that could be the decision made for us!

Thanks again ?