Barns make hay as couples seek quirky wedding venues

COUPLES are shunning hotel weddings in favour of quirky services in barns, a survey has found.

With the demand for unusual wedding venues soaring, the number of places registered to hold civil weddings in England and Wales has almost doubled in five years to 7,600.

A quarter of Britons marrying now want to book exotic venues such as sports arenas, racecourses, zoos, farms and even railway stations.

The most popular of the more unusual locations to marry is now a barn, chosen by 13 per cent of respondents in a survey carried out by the North Yorkshire Moors Railway.

When the law changed in 1995 to allow weddings to take place somewhere other than a religious setting or a register office, hotels, historic homes and function rooms were the favourites.

Whereas hotels are typically chosen by couples planning a more formal occasion, barns and other novelty venues can provide a more relaxed setting, hence their rise in popularity.

Of the marriages performed in civil ceremony-approved premises, just a third take place in a hotel. Register office weddings are down by half over the past five years to just 5 per cent.

Out of 247,000 marriages, about 180,000 are civil ceremonies, of which almost nine out of 10 were conducted in “approved premises”, an increase of 27 per cent from just five years ago.

Chris Price, of North Yorkshire Moors Railway, said: “There is a definite move away from the ‘off the shelf ’ conventional wedding.”