Venue hunting

Finding a venue was high on my priority list as I'd heard that they often get booked up up to a year in advance.
We quickly decided that Bath was a good place to get married as its a lovely area and the place where we met and went to university together. Unfortunately the fact that we no longer lived there and neither of our parents live there made it much harder to organise everything. Fortunately we do have some friends who still live there and let us stay whenever we needed to but it was still more hassle than it needed to be.

I started with a google search (no surprises there!) of wedding venues in the area and a rough idea of the number of guests we wanted. This allowed me to discount many venues straight away if they did not have the capacity we needed (73 in the end). I also rejected venues which were priced much higher than the average or weren't in the style I was looking for. We wanted a civil ceremony so we wanted to keep the ceremony and reception all in one place to make things easier. Civil ceremonies can only be held in licensed venues so we were able to knock off yet more venues from our list. I also found that almost all hotels would only host the reception until around 5:30 pm unless you paid to hire out the entire hotel for the night, pushing the cost up significantly. We did consider hiring out a hotel and recovering the cost from our guests who would book rooms off us for the night but in the end it would still have worked out much more expensive, not to mention that many hotels added a several thousand pound surcharge on top of the cost of all the rooms for the night.

Whilst I would have liked to stay overnight in the same venue as the wedding I wasn't prepared to pay the extra for it so I stopped looking at hotels apart from a very small number that didn't apply this extra cost. Luckily there are plenty of other venues dedicated purely to weddings and functions, often historic buildings, beautiful gardens or watermills. After making appointments to look round a few of these I was very disappointed to find none of them quite nice enough and began to wonder if the perfect venue was out there for the right price.

Finally I found Priston Mill which was absolutely perfect and booked it almost straight away! The demand was very high at Priston Mill and the weekends were almost fully booked for a year in advance but we were lucky enough to get a slot on a Sunday before a bank holiday Monday. They deal with all the catering in-house as well so no hassle with sorting that out either.