Our Venue

The Venue

Our initial idea for the ceremony was to have it in a large country house and have a ‘do-it-yourself’ village hall for our reception. We quickly found out that the nice places don’t just let you have the ceremony on Fridays and Saturdays.

We looked through wedding venue websites but I found it more helpful to look at the places licensed for civil ceremonies on local authority websites. I had a few in mind; but after realising how many guests we wanted, our budget just couldn’t do stretch to a lot of venues.

 Our first viewing was for an old coaching Inn in Ripley, Surrey called The Talbot Inn. Neither of us had been there before, but it was just about in budget and local enough to pop in without too much planning. The wedding planner, Michelle, was also very quick with her emails, which helps when you are as eager as I was! Both of us will admit that we didn’t expect too much, and didn’t really expect it to be the one for us. Michelle was super efficient and sat and asked us about the day we wanted. Michelle then showed us all the different rooms available, and the bedrooms. We walked away feeling well informed and a bit shocked…we loved it!

The Talbot Inn has history, charm, beauty and (most importantly for OH) fairy lights! I can’t wait to get married there.

We went and viewed a couple more venues that were in our budget, and we didn’t hate them, but they weren’t for us.

So The Talbot Inn it is then!