Are you looking to tie the knot somewhere in the UK, but haven’t made up your mind on the location yet?
We know it’s easy to get overwhelmed with so many factors at play… so we’ve done the research for you!
We looked at all 68 cities in the UK and ranked them based on seven key criteria, from the number of wedding venues to the average temperature in the wedding season.
From those data points, we calculated an overall ranking score for each city to determine the best places to get married in the UK.
Read on to find out which city is the best (and worst) to exchange your vows and wedding rings!
The best places in the UK to get married
Unsurprisingly, the UK’s capital city came out on top with the highest overall score by a large margin. Looking more closely, London outranks nearly every other city in the UK for our individual criteria. If you’re looking for a wide selection of wedding venues, florists, and hotels, the capital is the place to go.
If you’re more interested in aesthetics than practicality, a few cities outshine London in that regard. Manchester was found to be the most photogenic city with the highest number of Instagram geo-tags, and ranked second overall. Not bad!
Birmingham (3rd) and Ely (15th) also surpassed London in their number of Instagram geo-tags – an indication that they are both great options for stunning wedding photos.
Scotland is well represented in the top 10, with Edinburgh and Glasgow ranking 6th and 7th respectively.
A lower overall rank doesn’t necessarily mean the city is a bad option, depending on what you’re looking for. For example, Newcastle Upon Tyne (12th) drew with London for the most transport options for guests to travel to and from the wedding, making it a pretty convenient option in the North.
The worst places in the UK to get married
Now that you know which UK cities are the best to get married in, you’re probably wondering which ones are the worst. Here’s the rest of the UK:
We’re sorry to break it to anyone considering getting married in Armagh… According to our data, this city sits firmly at the bottom of our ranking due to having the least amount of Instagram geo-tags and only one florist available. An accurate placement, or an underrated gem? We’ll let you decide!
Along with Armagh, Rippon and St Asaph grace the bottom of our list for having zero wedding catering services at the time of our research. Plus, both cities also lack wedding florists.
While Cardiff is near the top in 11th place, generally it’s not looking great for weddings in Wales: Bangor ranks surprisingly low, sitting fifth from the bottom due to only having one catering service and zero florists.
We hope this list has at least made it slightly easier to narrow things down for you in planning your big day. But while all these factors are important to consider, ultimately the location should be wherever you’re happiest saying “I do”!
Our methodology
In order to find out which of the 68 cities in the UK was the best place to get married, we looked at seven different data points:
- The number of official wedding venues
- The number of local wedding catering services
- The number of available wedding florists in the city
- Approximate number of Instagram geo-tags
- The number of hotels
- The number of transport options
- The average temperature in the wedding season
To find out the number of wedding venues, wedding caterers and wedding florists we scraped the listings for each of these from Bridebook.
The approximate number of Instagram geo-tags was found by scraping Instagram meta descriptions for each location to give an approximate post count.
The number of hotels within a city was collated by scraping booking.com.
We found the number of transport options within each city by manually checking the available travel options in each city.
To find the average temperature of each city during the wedding season (May to October) we performed a Google search of “Average temperature of [CITY] by month”. We then took the temperature of each month from May to October and calculated an average using Microsoft Excel. Google’s source of temperature averages is NOAA (formerly NCDC).
Finally, in order to create an overall score for each city, we used this method: venues + florists + caterers + transport links + weather + (number of hotels /100) + (insta tags/10000).
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Are you looking to tie the knot somewhere in the UK, but haven’t made up your mind on the location yet?
We know it’s easy to get overwhelmed with so many factors at play… so we’ve done the research for you!
We looked at all 68 cities in the UK and ranked them based on seven key criteria, from the number of wedding venues to the average temperature in the wedding season.
From those data points, we calculated an overall ranking score for each city to determine the best places to get married in the UK.
Read on to find out which city is the best (and worst) to exchange your vows and wedding rings!
The best places in the UK to get married
Unsurprisingly, the UK’s capital city came out on top with the highest overall score by a large margin. Looking more closely, London outranks nearly every other city in the UK for our individual criteria. If you’re looking for a wide selection of wedding venues, florists, and hotels, the capital is the place to go.
If you’re more interested in aesthetics than practicality, a few cities outshine London in that regard. Manchester was found to be the most photogenic city with the highest number of Instagram geo-tags, and ranked second overall. Not bad!
Birmingham (3rd) and Ely (15th) also surpassed London in their number of Instagram geo-tags – an indication that they are both great options for stunning wedding photos.
Scotland is well represented in the top 10, with Edinburgh and Glasgow ranking 6th and 7th respectively.
A lower overall rank doesn’t necessarily mean the city is a bad option, depending on what you’re looking for. For example, Newcastle Upon Tyne (12th) drew with London for the most transport options for guests to travel to and from the wedding, making it a pretty convenient option in the North.
The worst places in the UK to get married
Now that you know which UK cities are the best to get married in, you’re probably wondering which ones are the worst. Here’s the rest of the UK:
We’re sorry to break it to anyone considering getting married in Armagh… According to our data, this city sits firmly at the bottom of our ranking due to having the least amount of Instagram geo-tags and only one florist available. An accurate placement, or an underrated gem? We’ll let you decide!
Along with Armagh, Rippon and St Asaph grace the bottom of our list for having zero wedding catering services at the time of our research. Plus, both cities also lack wedding florists.
While Cardiff is near the top in 11th place, generally it’s not looking great for weddings in Wales: Bangor ranks surprisingly low, sitting fifth from the bottom due to only having one catering service and zero florists.
We hope this list has at least made it slightly easier to narrow things down for you in planning your big day. But while all these factors are important to consider, ultimately the location should be wherever you’re happiest saying “I do”!
Our methodology
In order to find out which of the 68 cities in the UK was the best place to get married, we looked at seven different data points:
To find out the number of wedding venues, wedding caterers and wedding florists we scraped the listings for each of these from Bridebook.
The approximate number of Instagram geo-tags was found by scraping Instagram meta descriptions for each location to give an approximate post count. The number of hotels within a city was collated by scraping booking.com.
We found the number of transport options within each city by manually checking the available travel options in each city.
To find the average temperature of each city during the wedding season (May to October) we performed a Google search of “Average temperature of [CITY] by month”. We then took the temperature of each month from May to October and calculated an average using Microsoft Excel. Google’s source of temperature averages is NOAA (formerly NCDC).
Finally, in order to create an overall score for each city, we used this method: venues + florists + caterers + transport links + weather + (number of hotels /100) + (insta tags/10000).