Venue ahoy!

Well, we have a venue, which is a profound relief. Actually we've had a venue for a bit, but I've not had time to get on this blog, what with work and more work and trying to organise a wedding and cope with Mr Climate Change (the groom's) various plans and plots (see, for instance, www.onlyplanet.info).
So, having looked through the many nice places that pop up on a Google search for things like wedding venue + Manchester, a few miserable days were spent finding that most people book these places up months, if not years, in advance. Add to that the fact that most of them charge eye-watering amounts just for the venue, before you even get onto the food, and the prospects were lookign a bit depressing. Various people made various kind suggestions, most of which drew a blank (too busy, too small, too... meatie).
This, however, illustrates the power of the Google search term. Knock the word 'wedding' out and suddenly whole new horizons opened up. And I was reminded of Manchester Bridge Club. Which might sound a bit posh and fusty, but which we'd used for benefit events before, for the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and Windows for Peace. It's affordable, the right size, has a cash bar so I don't need to faff around thinking about drinks and glasses for the evening, and doesn't do catering so I can keep the independent, veggie-friendly, ethical caterers I'd started out with.
Breathe a long sigh of relief...
And now I also have a lovely double-decker bus, courtesy of Oxford Road stalwarts Finglands, to carry everyone from the registry office to the reception, hopefully deterring a few cars from the city centre.
Now, cake.

Something has to go right sometime

Well, wedding in 7 weeks and still no venue. From having been insanely stressed about it I have now reached a strange calm stage - I'm not sure if this is some kind of Zen acceptance that something will work out, one way or another, or whether I'm just in a state of past-hysterical denial. Either way I'm sure it'll all be FINE (maybe). Obviously by now lots of places are booked up (who are all these people getting hitched in September? I thought everyone was meant to do this in June) and unfortunately on that day Lancashire Cricket Club already has 3 weddings and 2 parties booked, so OA and his England-supporting best man won't be able to trade speech insults in view of the pitch, but I think I've now reached the stage of thinking - shall we say - creatively.
I've now finished washing the last of the oak & elder champagne bottles which were covered in shards of glass from those muppets at Amtrak smashing a bunch of them. So my diminutive living room is now full of cardboard boxes, partly clearing-out stuff to take to the Wesley for my colleague Finn and partly cases of Scottish bubbly.
And as of yesterday I have the rings. Again, for a combination of ethics and cost, we've gone for second hand. Both very plain gold bands, they came from a jeweller in central Manchester, Arthur Kay on the corner of St Ann's Square, well known for its big old sign (I guess there since it was set up in 1897) proclaiming that they sell wedding bands by weight only. No longer entirely true, but for delightfully reasonable prices we now have a standard gold band for OA and a lovely little rose gold band, hallmarked Birmingham 1871, for me. And for a similar price or less than it would have cost to get something from Argos...
And the REALLY important bit is proceeding nicely, ie the honeymoon. Train tickets ahoy - we've now at least got them sorted between Manchester and Madrid and back, although it's amazing to find that tickets like those for the Paris-Madrid sleepers are already booking up now - hopefully a sign that people are taking up train instead of air travel within Europe. The Morocco plan has probably fallen by the wayside; I would want to rush around Morocco looking at STUFF and indulging my latent archaeologist's tendency to want to stare intently at bits of tile and sandy bricks and bits of discoloured earth, trying to find out their radiocarbon date or what civilisation put them there. OA is not a big fan of this kind of stuff. So, tied as we are to starting in south-western Spain by other commitments, it looks like more of a Spain/Portugal job, with lots of opportunities for lying around being very lazy, reading fat books, eating lovely food and drinking nice local wine. I haven't yet sussed out how to book tickets for the Seville-Faro bus (although I'm sure further investigation on the wonderful Seat61.com will enlighten me), but I do know that there is a sleeper back from Lisbon to Madrid, and OA speaks Portuguese from his volunteering days in Angola and Mozambique, so if necessary he'll be drafted in on that.
So. Wedding music. Am I allowed Leonard Cohen's Song of the French Partisan, or is that too political/depressing?

Bah humbug

Obviously, with a nice caterer and a daftly cheap and lovely dress and everything looking like it was well on the way to being sorted, something had to go wrong. No, the groom hasn't high-tailed it back to the Antipodes, which I suppose I must be thankful for. But OA and I no longer have a venue for anything but the minimal little 20-minute bit at the registry office.
Of course, the registry office bit is the most important and significant bit and all that - but it was also the easiest to organise. And now, thanks to Birch Community Centre's architects and their unpredictable ways with wet concrete, I need to find a new hall, function room or whatever it is, within our meagre budget, ideally with a kitchen that the caterers can use and even more ideally with a cash bar. And none of the ones I can think of are returning my calls...
Gretna has never looked so appealing.

Manchester Evening News tips for an ethical wedding

My local paper, the Manchester Evening News, ran a green weddings piece - see the post below. Here's the 'top tips' and 'eco-chic made easy' sections which weren't reproduced in the main article.

Top tips to going ethical on your big day
- go green with your accessories, like charm bracelets from [Fair Trade retailer] Traidcraft
- Green gifts [like a photo frame, also from Traidcraft] can be chic as well as sustainable
- Eat, drink and be merry - with a healthy conscience - with a Fairtrade wine mixed case from Traidcraft
- Instead of favours on the tables, why not do something different and donate the money through Oxfam's Unwrapped - the money you spend on sweets for each guest could pay for a goat for a nomadic family

Eco-chic made easy for brides
Liz Taylor (yes, really) of TLC has these top tips to getting a bit of eco chic as you walk up the aisle:
- stay local - choose a venue as close to home as possible to reduce car travel;
- send invitations by email - or printed locally on recycled card using vegetable-based inks;
- source food and drink locally where possible - also look at local brews or high-quality English wine instead of champagne [for some suggestions, see the Fizz section of this blog];
- go vintage with your wedding dress to tick that recycled box;
- get guests to join in the green theme by getting the train to the venue instead of driving.

On this last point, OA and I are trying to make it easier for guests to get to our wedding by public transport. One of the ways we're doing that is to hire a double-decker bus to get everyone from the registry office in Manchester city centre out to the community centre where we're having the reception - so no-one has an excuse to bring a car to get from one to the other (although we figure it's only fair to make exceptions for my 93-year-old Gran and the aunt and uncle bringing her from North Wales, and one set of friends who have two children under 3 to transport... we're nothing if not reasonable ;-))

Interview #2: Liz O'Neill

Liz O'Neill is head of communications at the Vegetarian Society. She and husband Joe, a teacher, were married in July 2002.

“Our desire to have an ethical wedding started with the fact that I was vegetarian and Joe is a strict vegan,” says Liz, “so we wanted to have good food that met with our ethical beliefs. And then it just made sense to approach other parts of the wedding so that it reflected how we felt about the world.

“Out guests covered a really wide spread of ages and interests, from some who very much agreed with us politically and socially to others who didn't really know about our beliefs. But afterwards, lots of people said it was a really good wedding in that it totally reflected who we are as people and as a couple, instead of just being like everybody else's wedding days.”

As well as sourcing almost entirely vegan food from a small vegetarian restaurant in Chorlton, Manchester, Liz applied environmental and fair trade ideas to the rest of the wedding.

“One of the hardest things was the flowers. I went into so many florists and was just met with blanks stares or even one place which laughed at me when I asked about local or fair trade flowers – I think awareness of the issues has increased loads since then, but a lot of places just didn't have a clue five or six years ago. Lots of people assumed that because I wanted things to be ethical I was looking for a hippy look, when actually we wanted something quite classic – modern and urban, but very smart too. People kept offering me grasses!

“But eventually I found a place in Buxton where the woman was interested in helping to source them, and she did a great job – she even dropped them off herself on the way to visit her mum!”

Another issue that Joe and Liz felt strongly about was waste. “I'm always upset by all of those little table decorations and favours and things you get at weddings, which mostly must end up in the bin,” says Liz.

One of Liz's solutions was to ask friends and several local restaurants to save the cobalt-blue bottles that companies like Ty Nant sell mineral water in, and Neal's Yard toiletries are packaged in. They were used to make striking vases for fresh flowers on each table at the reception. Liz made many of the table decorations herself, using ribbons and materials from craft shops.

Joe is also a very keen cyclist, so the couple had a cycle rickshaw to carry them from the church to their reception.

Liz's dress came from a small boutique and was made by a European designer, while Joe had a suit made at a local tailor in Nottingham, where he was living at the time. “Neither place was particularly super-ethical,” says Liz, “but they were the kind of independent local businesses that we felt it was important to support, and they provided us with just what we wanted.”

And following a Roman Catholic church service, Liz and Joe's reception was held at a local community centre. “We really enjoyed, and felt strongly about, celebrating our wedding somewhere that was local to us and where we were part of a community, rather than going somewhere in another part of the country where we didn't have any connections. It was a very affordable venue, too – in the end we were able to provide all the drinks as well as food, outfits, flowers, venue etc for less than £10,000.”

Liz's main recommendation is just to take each stage of the wedding planning process as it comes, and then to think about what the alternatives might be. “If you just view it as lots of single jobs and find a way of doing each one of them as you want it, it suddenly seems much more manageable,” she says.

Interview with Rebecca & Hugo Whately

Here is the first of my interview posts - conversations with people who've had green or ethical weddings and who have ideas and tips for those of use still in the planning phases!

Rebecca and Hugo Whately

We decided to get married about 18 months before the wedding and we really struggled about how to do it. We didn't know how we wanted to get married – we knew we didn't want to get married in a church and we were quite put off by a lot of things that we traditional about the traditional wedding and wedding industry, so it took us about 6 months of thinking about how to do it – whether we wanted a big wedding and lots of people.

And one of our concerns about having a big wedding was the environmental impact of having that many people travel and huge amounts of food. Coincidentally, Hugo found Daphne and Penrhos on the internet, and my family already knew about Penrhos, so it seemed an ideal place for us to get married. We met Daphne and really liked her and we really like the kind of thing she did at Penrhos [Penrhos is a converted mediaeval manor farm in the Welsh Borders, with a pioneering organic restaurant and interests local food. They offer a full range of wedding facilities and help with planning green weddings.]

For both of us food is really important, we're both really appreciate good food but also food that's sourced locally and organically and seasonally, which Daphne does.

So that was a brilliant start really, and once we'd decided to have it at Penrhos we pretty much just trusted Daphne, because I didn't have any clear ideas the way some people do of how I wanted it to be, so we trusted her to sort it out. I didn't have an image in my head of some huge day – my partner Hugo actually did more organisation than I did, I'm usually really put off by big events and that meant that I wasn't the middle of organising it all so I could actually be quite calm and had an amazing day.

So Daphne sorted out a lot of it, like the food, and it was really nice because everyone could stay at Penrhos – we had about a hundred people with all our families and Daphne was really flexible and sorted it out with the local farmer so that people who weren't staying in the building could camp in one of his fields next door, which was great.

She was really brilliant at really taking on as much as we wanted her to take on but being flexible on things like having lots of our friends camping in the field next door.

We also made the invitations ourselves and wrote them out.

Ethical dresses, suits and rings?

For the clothing it was really amazing, once of my friends offered to make my dress. The material wasn't sourced really environmentally, I suppose – it came from a fabric shop on the Edgeware Road in London, and my friend over the year made my dress with the added challenge that over the year it had to change shape because during the year I became pregnant so the design needed to be changed for that.

And Hugo had a pair of linen trousers from years ago and he got a waistcoat and shirt from Green Fibres.

The rings – Daphne did a printout of things like local bands and local jewellers and flowers and we used that a lot – so actually we used a local jeweller in Worcestershire, we went for a weekend with him up there and made our own rings and he was this incredible character and had this incredible studio in the countryside which looked over the countryside, and he was there to make sure there weren't any disasters and to make sure we ended up with a ring each! And he sourced the white gold for us in the jewellery quarter in Birmingham.

Weddings lists

We ummed and aaahed about the idea of a wedding list. We didn't particularly like the idea of a wedding list and the over-consumption of the whole wedding industry and the wastefulness of it in some ways and going with the usual rituals just for the sake of it, so we tried to be a bit... [Hugo in background – 'spending for spending's sake'] so in the end we had a wedding list with Green Fibres and got some bedding from there, and then there's a little traditional shop round the corner from us which is run by a couple and does kitchenware and garden things, and they were great, so it was just those two things.

Local flowers

And then flowers- a friend of Daphne's tries to do flowers in a more ethical, local way and grows a lot in her garden and grows wild flowers and herbs and we didn't get any of the flowers from abroad, it was all flowers grown locally. and a friend of mine made my bouquet from her garden.

Cost?

It cost less than £10,000 for a hundred people and that included paying for people to stay the night at Penrhos and for people to camp, and we paid for all the drinks in the evening, and that included everyone staying overnight in the building or camping and then having a big breakfast the next day together. It was really lovely – having been someone who was quite phobic of big parties and bringing all these different people together it actually turned out to be a really incredible day.

Mum and Dad made the wedding cake and Hugo's brothers did the music – basically Daphne did everything we wanted her to and then we could add things on like that.

And the food was incredible – I think people sometimes have the idea that if it's going to be organic food it's going to be a bit bleurgh, but it was really beautifully cooked and delicious.

Advice?

I think it's quite good at each step to think about how to do it and thinking about whether there's an alternative way. So we didn't really sit down and plan it but because we were engaged well before we got married we had plenty of time to think about it, so we could do the invitations and you can easily do those yourself, and thinking about everything from flowers to wedding lists. Particularly now it's not so difficult, there are lots of people who offer alternative services and also i think people who are coming to the wedding like friends and family, we didn't want to be really sanctimonious about it, not everyone agrees with us completely, so it was about having a really incredible day without trying to push a particular political or ethical stance, but at the same time it just had that feel to it.

Hugo: we wanted to get married but we didn't like weddings!

A lot of people find finding the venue difficult, so finding a venue where everything was like that was great and they could organise so much of it and then we could just do the bits we wanted – that was perfect. People who usually go to church weddings said they were surprised by how moving the ceremony could be without being in a church – we passed the rings round, we got married inside this tiny little room and then went outside and passed the rings round to everyone held them and it kind of included everyone in the ceremony.

Honeymoon

And then we went for our honeymoon on an eco-retreat in Wales, in this incredibly luxurious blissful teepee with a fire and lots of rugs, outside Machynlleth, four miles down a dirt track.

Where oh where?

Last year I did a report for Ethical Consumer magazine on the British hotel sector, and everything I turned up then put me off having any bit of my wedding in a standard hotel function suite, which seems to be one of the standard places for having a wedding reception. The hotel industry in general (along with the restaurant industry, which I'm researching at the moment) was just stunning in its poor grasp of basic ideas of corporate responsibility, an industry whose idea of addressing its environmental impact in an era of impending ecological doom goes, in the vast majority of cases, no further than asking guests to use their towels more than one day on the trot. And that's without going into the toe-curling horribleness of the working conditions in this notoriously poorly paid and casualised market, which is of course dependent on the labour of hundreds or thousands of exploited illegal or precarious immigrants. See www.londoncitizens.org.uk for their Living Wage campaign, and The Guardian's article about their hospitality sector campaign for some really depressing individual stories – http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2006/apr/29/careers.work
One of the problems with avoiding horrible hotel chains is that you can't always spot them immediately. While some hotels, such as Hilton and Radisson, use their brand names as a major selling point, the current fashion for 'individual, authentic, boutique' hotels means that there is also a subset of quite nice looking-places that spend lots of marketing money pretending to be all those things and then turn out to be owned by a set of generic scumbags.
Of course, hotels are just one option, and a pretty expensive one at that. As I will probably mention a bunch of times in the coming ten months, about the first thing my colleague Jenny said to me when I announced that I was getting married was: don't tell anyone who's selling you anything that it's for a wedding – they'll just double the price. And wedding suites are no exception. Apparently the fashionable place for big weddings in Manchester at the moment is the beautiful atrium space at City Art Gallery, but I can only assume that the price of that would be somewhere in a different galaxy from what I'm looking at, and to be honest I think I'd feel like a bit of a nana using a place that grand.
My mate Liz overcame this by basically renting the local church hall, and doing by all accounts a gorgeous job of decorating it – she put out an appeal for those lovely cobalt-blue Ty Nant mineral water bottles months before, and had them on each table with flowers in. My friend Sarah did a similar thing for her hippy wedding ten years ago – ceremony in an apple orchard under an umbrella followed by a proper knees up in a village hall, well away from any neighbours who were going to want the band to be quiet at midnight or one or three a.m. Jenny's big back garden, hidden behind an ordinary looking urban semi, came in very handy for a buffet in what used to be the stable and lots of space to mill about and talk to the chickens. Good thing it didn't rain. Anything outdoorsy is obviously OFF the agenda for Manchester in September...
This kind of thing can work well depending on how much organising time you have. My inclination is to find some way of doing as little organising as possible, but that's currently proving difficult. Liz is bloody marvellous at organising things – it's her job, in some respects – and even she hired a kind of on-site administrator for the day, so that she wouldn't have to handle anything that went All Wrong with the venue or the caterers or the transport. I haven't asked her what she did about cleaning up the church hall afterwards, though. And what about drinking and dancing? A Church of England booklet my sister told me about on how to do weddings on a budget suggests a bring-a-bottle approach to avoid the cost of huge amounts of booze, which is one option. I quite fancy the idea of somewhere that has a cash bar, so I don't have to think about that much.
So, unlike the posts up to now, I don't have an answer to this one yet. I suppose I should have anticipated the fact that even little nice not-for-profit bar venues in the town centre would be booked out a year in advance. But they are, or at least threaten to be. So I'm still looking.