Lucinda and I were married on the 20th July 2007 (20.07.2007 – have to try and make it easy to remember somehow) at St. David’s School in Ashford, Middlesex. St. David’s girls school was (as of September 2010 St. David’s school has closed and the building has been repurposed to become St James Independent School for Senior Boys) a public school set in 32 acres of land including its own lake. It was initially opened in 1716 but the present building is a little younger, built in 1857. It has a kind of Harry Potter feel about it and we thought that as was such a beautiful venue with a deep history, the people that ran the venue were friendly, the price was good and the photos would be nice. It also gave us the opportunity to include the school theme into our wedding arrangements with favours consisting of a 10p (or what would have been 10p when we were at school!) bag of sweets (or suck as we would say in the Black Country) and a pencil with our names and the dates on, and throughout the day a help yourself tuck shop for the guests.
Besides its charm we thought it was ideal because it was a ‘one stop’ venue. There was adequate parking for all our guests, close to a main line, close to home for all our ‘local’ friends. It was licensed for civil ceremonies (and alcohol), could cater for our guests, but had the bonus that we could use the school chapel for a blessing from the school chaplain. Thus, we took full advantage of this and had our marriage blessed immediately after the civil ceremony. The only downside to the venue was, due to health and safety concerns, there was an imposed maximum of 90 guests for the ceremony and the sit down meal. This meant that we had to be a little ruthless with who we could invite which caused us to make some tough decisions and, in turn, upset some people. Ideally, we would have easily invited 130 guests.
England awoke on the morning of the 20th July 2007 to a deluge of diluvian proportions. Over a month’s worth of rain fell that morning (although that seems barely creditable from our photos) resulting in large areas of the country flooded. This caused a few problems for guests and a number had very difficult journeys to make it to our ceremonies, so a belated thank you to all of you that battled through the floods to celebrate our big day. We thoroughly enjoyed it and we hope all those that were there did too.
This a selection of our favourite wedding photos. There are 200 (or so) more on our Flickr pages if you are interested.
