wedding information

(us in Greece)

Emma Bowman & Mark Willer

Saturday, 6th August 2005

London, England

Ceremony: 13:00 at Council House (Purple Room)

Reception: afterwards at our house

INFO: emmabean@hotmail.com

Details of the day

Ceremony: We have decided to get married at the Registry Office in Westminster as we both liked it better than the Brent registry office (the one closest to home).  Council House is located at Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5PT.  It is easily recognised by its ten columns, and two statues of lions flanking large steps.  It is situated between Gloucester Place (a road) and Marylebone Library.  See the map of the location; it's circled in red:

We are booked there for 1pm on August 6th 2005.

We were interested to know that other people who have married there include Paul and Linda McCartney, Ringo Starr, Terence Stamp, Nicole Farhi, David Hare, Antonio Banderas, Melanie Griffith, David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit.

The Purple Room was recently refurbished and holds 80 people seated (there is room to stand as well - the room can hold up to 100).  It is located on the first floor of the building and can be accessed by lift or stairs.  See picture below:

Reception: After the ceremony, everyone will return to our house and we'll have a party in the backyard. We'll start with a drinks reception and move on to lunch.  A street map of our neighbourhood can be found here.

We are renting a marquee (large tent) as you can't count on the weather here, along with tables, chairs and a dance floor.  We've already trimmed the trees to accomodate it!

We have a caterer booked, who will provide a buffet for a late lunch around 3pm, and then some snacky food later in the evening.  They'll be some music to dance to but I am not sure how we are organising that one yet.  

Some people, like the neighbours, will be invited to an evening finger buffet and the rest of the party, but not the rest of the day.

Travel information

Coming from Canada:  We really appreciate the effort that many of you are taking to try to be able to attend the day.  We want to be of as much help as possible, so do please get in touch with any questions.

Traveling from overseas can form the bulk of your holiday cost.  For those coming across the Atlantic from Canada, we can help a little bit with this.  In our experience, Zoom Airlines has more leg room and is cheaper than Air Transat.  However, taking Zoom from Toronto means you will have to stop in either Ottawa or Halifax both ways, and it makes the journey a bit longer.  Probably best if you are in Ottawa as opposed to Toronto!  But it’s not so bad.  They both land at London Gatwick. 

The British charters Thomas Cook and MyTravel have lowered their prices since Zoom started, and in fact direct summer 2005 flights are offered online now (follow instructions to search for flights from Canada, not the UK) at Canadian Affair.  It also lands at Gatwick. 

In a pinch, you can also fly here via the US or Germany for relatively cheap on Northwest, Continental or Lufthansa but I should hope you would be able to find something else more direct for not any more money. 

The downside of the cheap airlines is that landing at Gatwick means you are going to the airport farthest away from the centre of London, and our house (like 1.5 hours away if traffic is okay).  You can take the Gatwick Express train to London Victoria train/tube station (hint: buying your ticket on the train saves hassle and doesn’t cost any more) and use the Journey Planner (see below) to complete your journey. 

Obviously if you are willing to spend more money, Air Canada and British Airways are the better options.  And you will land at Heathrow if you take them, which is only a ½ hour from our house and a tube ride away from the centre of London.  You may be able to find good deals with travel agents but as we are too cheap to fly the better airlines, we don’t really know!!

Coming from within the UK: Council House is in Central London, so parking may be a problem.  There is an NCP car park almost directly across the street from the building that is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but from the looks of it it's fairly expensive.  You can find it on here if you do a search by postcode (NW1 5PT).  Westminster City Council has a page on its site that outlines parking restrictions in the area around Council House here. Follow the link for a map of the area that looks a bit confusing, but it serves you right for wanting to park downtown! Please note there is no congestion charge on weekends so you don't have to worry about that. Also there will be unrestricted street parking near our house when we get back from the ceremony. We'll send an apology note in advance to the neighbours (many other people have done the same for family weddings near us).

The tube or rail trains are convenient and cheaper than parking.  Council House is walking distance from both Baker Street and Marylebone stations (served by mainline rail and the Underground/tube).  Using the Jubilee line (tube) from Baker Street will also get you to our house afterwards for the reception.  We are about a 10 minute walk from Kingsbury station, one north of Wembley Park.  The Transport for London Journey Planner is a REALLY useful website to aid in your London public transportation usage.  Unfortunately just because Mark works for the tube doesn't mean that we can get free passes for everyone.  Sorry!

I'll get Mark to do up some driving directions, but I'll say for now that we live close to the M1 and A40 in the north west part of London, very near to Wembley Stadium and Harrow.  The AA does good maps and journey planning by car.

Again, get in touch with us if you need any help. You could also use the Guestbook at the bottom for general comments or questions.

Renting a car: Are you crazy?!  Okay, only consider renting a car if you feel like paying astronomical amounts of money for petrol (gas), you don't want to stay anywhere in London itself so you don't have access to very good public transportation, you know that you have to pay £5 a day if you want to drive in central London (you lunatic), and you are feeling really good about driving on the left side of the road with a stick shift.  If you like this idea, try EasyCar for relatively cheap rental.  Kristen, Grace and I used it to take a road trip out to Exmoor National Park and it actually did work out better than taking the train - cheaper too, since all three of us split the cost.  It's only a few pounds a day from EasyCar, but you don't get much mileage.  Some branches do have automatics, check it out, although it's not common here.

Other travel arrangements: Many of you will be turning this trip into an opportunity to visit another part of Europe.  A great idea!  Low budget airlines to Europe are cheap and easy.  Ryanair and Easyjet seem to be the most commonly used - this page looks really handy as it lists all of the ones that are available.  They often fly to underused airports in Europe, farther outside of main centres, but it's not always the case.  My mother and I flew Easyjet to the main airport in Amsterdam, Schipol.  They usually leave from London Gatwick (again, 1.5 hours south of here), London Luton (closer as it's north west of London, about a 40 minute drive from our house) and London Stanstead.  All of them are accessible by mainline rail or coach.

You might also want to consider taking the Eurostar, which is a fairly comfortable way of reaching France or Belgium by train.  It leaves from Waterloo Station.

Accommodation

If you don't have a baby or young children to bring with you, and you can put up with communal living, staying in a hostel in central London is a good idea.  It will be relatively cheap, you might meet some nice people from other countries, and you can stay near the attractions that you'll want to visit when you are here.  Plus getting to our house is easy by public transportation.  If you do a Google search on London hostels, you will probably find a million websites but here's one anyway.  If you need to know more about the area that you want to stay in, let me know and I will help you out.

Using the website Up My Street, and plugging in our post code (NW9 9NT) will allow you to find local accommodation to our house if this suits you (use the 'Find my Nearest...' feature, then travel & tourism).  I don't think that I can block book accommodation if we aren't having a reception at the hotel, though I may be wrong.  I will look into this.

Here's a hotel literally 5 minute's walk away from our house, but we have no idea if it's nice or not:Kingsland Hotel. Think of the convenience if you are coming to the reception though! If you follow the Tourism link on that website, it actually will give you a good idea of local B&B's and hotels.

Visit London has a vast amount of information on the city and has some accommodation deals for mostly centrally located hotels.  I am sure there are numerous other websites offering hotels in London, but I haven't looked yet!  Okay I lied here is one I just found: cheap London hotels.  I have now noticed that they seem to offer many deals around for hotels near Wembley Stadium - if you can get one of these, you will do well as you will very near to us (possibly even walking distance) and you will have pretty good transport links to the centre.

People (some of the 120 invited guests that you may end up meeting...)

Best men: Chula Rupasinha and John Formston

Best women: Tami Kitay and Samantha Muir

Bride's mother: Margery Bowman

Bride's father: Stewart Bowman

Bride's brother: Mark Bowman

Bride's grandparents: Eileen Bowman, and Ivy & Arthur Fitton

Groom's mother:  Brenda Daglish (and husband Ron Daglish)

Groom's father: Derrick Willer (and wife Zari Willer)

Groom's sister: Elizabeth Willer (and partner Miles)

Groom's grandparents: Grace Blackwell and Ivy Willer

this page will be updated regularly - last update 6th April 2005

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