Stats & social history

When WeddingVenues.com launched back in 2002, there were just 50,000 weddings a year in approved venues. Approved venues are country houses, hotels, museums and race courses; in fact everything except religious buildings and registry offices.

By 2007 (the latest government figures available) there were 99,700. As a percentage of all weddings, those in approved venues have risen from 20% to 43% and the trend is still up. What this means if you’re a venue owner is that you are working in a growing market. What it means if you’re a bride or groom planning your ceremony or reception is that there is more and more choice.

The National Statistics Office publishes all sorts of interesting facts and figures, going way back to 1862. There were 164,030 weddings that year, including Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Alice’s to Prince Ludwig of Hesse by the Rhine. Not a lot of people know that, as Michael Caine may or may not have said.

There are plenty of nuggets of social history to dug out. For example, the published figures reached an all time peak in 1940, early in the Second World War. Some 470,549 weddings took place that year, as people took the opportunity to marry while they could. As Harold L. Smith puts it in his book War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War, “Thousands of people decided to marry while they still had the chance…..The basic unit of survival was apparently two”. Further into the war, the rate dropped steeply. In 1941, there were 381,921 marriages and by 1943 the number was down to 296,432.

The same pattern occurred in the First World War, though the numbers were lower. This is presumably because in WW2 conscription applied from the outbreak of the war, while service was voluntary until 1916 in WW1, meaning there wasn’t quite such a desperate need to marry.

When the next set of weddings stats is released, we’ll post them on the site.