Firstly HUGE congratulations to Stacey Solomon and Joe Swash on their wedding this week. I wish them a lifetime of happiness together. I have loved watching all the preparations unfold over the last few weeks on Instagram. If you don’t already follow her on insta you are missing out on a lot of wholesome family content, house renovation and DIY posts. I have had lots of questions from people about why / how she has been able to get married at home so I thought I would tell you all.
Stacey and Joe chose to have the wedding they wanted in their own garden at Pickle Cottage. This isn’t an option only available to celebrities, anyone can chose to do it this way, and I have been fortunate enough to hold ceremonies in some very beautiful private gardens and special places.
They chose a private faith based blessing in front of their closest friends & family and a bespoke wedding ceremony and celebration of their love for each other, choosing to register the marriage legally at a later date. This takes ten minutes at a registry office and doesn’t have to include rings or vows as it is a very simple formal process. The way that I explain it to couples is that completing the legals is a bit like going to register a birth or death, and leaves a couple able to have the wedding ceremony wherever they like.
Marriage law in the UK currently doesn’t allow for weddings that take place in private homes to be legalised without a separate trip to the registry office, so basically separating the marriage (paperwork) and the wedding (beautiful meaningful ceremony). It’s the same process you would follow if you were planning to have a wedding abroad.
Hopefully this is all about to change. A law reform report was published last week with suggestions to government that will hopefully mean that instead of the venue being licensed for marriage, it will be the officiant that is licensed, so independent celebrants like me will be able to perform legally binding ceremonies wherever you like, be that in a fabulous wedding venue, on a beach, in a bandstand or your back garden. This will also give couples more choice not only on where the ceremony is, but also what the content of the ceremony is, and who conducts the ceremony.
It will be another couple of years before this is all agreed, but it is great progress and something as a Celebrant I am really excited about as the change is long overdue.
Big congratulations to Stacey and Joe, and huge thanks for giving Celebrants a platform to explain what we do and how it all works 🥰🥰