Amy & Paul // Islington Town Hall + Balfour St Barts

Islington Town Hall Wedding confetti photo

An Islington Town Hall & Balfour St Barts Wedding

Amy & Paul’s winter wedding at Islington Town Hall and Balfour St Barts was so lovely! These two London venues are a brilliant combination. Whenever I get booked for them I know it’s going to be an awesome day. They attract really lovely couples who want an informal, chilled but also fun day. That also matches my photography style. I like to blend in with your guests to unobtrusively capture your wedding day. Capturing natural moments of unadulterated joy and sharing that with my couples so that they can feel that joy for years to come is my passion. If you’d like me to be your Balfour St Barts Wedding Photographer or Islington Town Hall Photographer please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Amy & Paul

I got on so well with Amy & Paul that they have genuinely become great friends of my wife and I! Our 2-year-old sons go to the same nursery and at the time of writing are about to go on a play date at a soft play centre. They’ve even looked after Maple, our dog for us. That’s how lovely they are! I’ve now also shot Amy’s sister’s wedding in North Norfolk so feel I’ve become their family photographer. Amy and Paul are two of those people you meet who you instantly feel at ease with. They’re genuine and generous. I always find that weddings are an amazing reflection of the personalities of the couple and this one was no different. It was warm, welcoming, relaxed but great fun too. I’m so happy they found me and picked me as their Balfour St Barts wedding photographer! I loved capturing so many lovely moments of pure happiness for them.

You can read more about their wedding story below…

How did you guys meet?
We both used to work for the same newspaper.

Tell me a bit about yourselves
Paul is Art Editor on that same newspaper, and I’m a freelance journalist. We live in South East London and we’re having a baby this October.

How did the proposal go down?
Paul proposed on Christmas Eve on Wells-Next-The-Sea beach in Norfolk – my favourite day of the year, and my favourite place in the world! We were having Christmas with my family, and unfortunately for Paul, I guessed very early on what was happening – pretty much as soon as he asked me if I wanted to go on a walk later, just the two of us. Blame my journalist’s nose for a story?!

How did you choose your wedding venue?
Initially we wanted to get married in Norfolk, on a beautiful but quite remote field in my parent’s village, and had even put down a few deposits for a May date. It would have been absolutely amazing, but also would have involved a huge amount of planning and logistics, and it was making me in particular feel really anxious and full of dread. Paul is very chilled, whereas I tend to be a worrier…

… So we pulled the plug, and decided to do something that would need way less planning. We love Norfolk, but decided that if we weren’t going to get married on the field, we’d do something totally different and have it in London. After Googling ‘wedding’ pubs and visiting a couple one evening, we really liked St Bart’s Brewery – the team there were so helpful, friendly and relaxed…

…When we looked at what weekends they had free, we decided it would be fun to go for a December wedding (not least because there would be free decorations up, ha!) We chose Islington Town Hall because it was the nearest registry office to the reception venue, and it looked nice online. We didn’t actually visit it until a couple of weeks before the wedding, when it would have been too late to change anything anyway. In the end all our haphazard decisions ended up being serendipitous, because if we’d stuck to the original May wedding, we’d have had to cancel it due to the coronavirus.

What sort of experience did you want your guests to have?
Relaxed and fun. We really thought that if you have good music, good friends and enough food and drink, your guests will have an amazing time – we’d still say that now. You should only obsess over details if it will make you happy, because your guests are really unlikely to remember things like party favours or which canapés they ate.

Can you describe some of the details and stylings, did your wedding have a theme?
Not really, apart from a vague colour theme – dark blue and berry colours. There was also a Christmas theme, as the venue had a beautiful tree and fairy lights everywhere, which we loved. Paul obviously designed all the invites, place cards and seating charts etc. Our friend Ali, aka Bloomologie, did me the most beautiful bouquet and put some very simple greenery and candles on the tables. My major regret is that I left the bouquet on a table, I would have loved to try to dry it or press it and keep it but I just didn’t think about it at the time. I also forgot to toss the bouquet, which would have been fun! We also sent one of my nephews around with a very old polaroid, and he took some brilliant pictures and stuck them into a book with people’s drunken messages.

What was your best decision during the wedding planning?
We’re so happy we went for a Christmas wedding. There’s such a special atmosphere around that time of year already, and it was a little bit different. We were seriously lucky that it didn’t rain until everyone was inside the reception, when it didn’t matter.

The most difficult decision?
Definitely sorting the seating plan. It was like a massive, shifting game of jenga.

What were your favourite memories of the day?
Too many! You can see from the crazy grin on my face in all the pictures. One moment which was particularly amazing was when we arrived at the reception to find that some of Paul’s colleagues, who are also my former colleagues, had made a ‘wedding’ newspaper and left one on every seat – complete with loads of ‘front page’ pictures of us, and hilarious copy that (gently) took the piss out of Paul. It was a total, brilliant surprise.

Superstar wedding suppliers who helped make this wedding amazing: