Hampton Court Palace

The approach sets the tone. You come to it along the river or over the bridge, past the outer courts and the great gatehouse, into a sequence of brick quadrangles that have not fundamentally changed since Henry VIII walked them. Above one of them turns the astronomical clock, made in 1540, still telling the hour, the day, the month and the phase of the moon. By the time a couple reaches the door of the Great Hall, the wedding has already acquired a weight that no amount of styling could manufacture. The building does the work.

The palace is run by Historic Royal Palaces, the charity that also cares for the Tower of London and Kensington Palace, and it hires for weddings in three quite different ways. That range is the first thing to understand. You can marry intimately by the river, you can take a garden orangery for the day, or you can have the palace itself in the evening. Each is a genuine royal setting; they simply differ in scale, in season and, considerably, in cost.

The grandest route is evening exclusive hire of the palace. Because Hampton Court is open to the public by day, the full palace becomes available only after hours, and then it is yours: a civil ceremony in the medieval Great Hall, the last hammerbeam hall built for an English monarch, licensed for up to 200 guests, followed by a wedding breakfast for 220 beneath Tudor tapestries and heraldic glass. Palace weddings start from around eighteen thousand pounds plus VAT as a dry hire, before catering, and every pound of it shows.

An evening hire is not one room but a procession through the palace. Couples marrying here have taken their vows in the Great Hall or the Chapel Royal, whose vaulted ceiling is a deep royal blue studded with gold, dined beneath the hammerbeam roof, and then moved the party down into Henry VIII's Historic Kitchens and their brick undercroft, where the palace team still cooks over open fires by day. It is worth knowing the practical shape of it: evening exclusive hire runs from January to mid-May and from mid-July to December, leaving the peak of summer to the public, so a palace wedding tends to be a spring or an autumn affair, candlelit and grand.

For a smaller wedding, the Little Banqueting House is the palace's hidden secret: a Baroque pavilion built beside the Thames for William III, its ceilings painted by Antonio Verrio, with a private walled garden of its own. It holds around fifty guests for a ceremony and reception, which makes it one of the most romantic small-wedding rooms near London. Hire starts from around three and a half to five thousand pounds depending on the package, and the river runs quietly past the windows throughout.

The Garden Room is the all-in-one option. A light 1920s-style orangery set inside its own private walled garden, it is licensed for civil ceremonies and made for the full day: vows under the glass, drinks on the terrace, a wedding breakfast for up to a hundred and eighty, then dancing and a live band as the evening comes down over the garden. From around five thousand pounds, it is the closest the palace comes to a single beautiful room that does everything.

What ties all three together is that Hampton Court is a dry hire, not a package. The palace hands you the rooms, the gardens and a list of approved caterers and suppliers, and the day is yours to shape. That suits couples who want to design a wedding rather than choose one, and it makes the palace unusually good for multicultural celebrations: the approved caterers cover halal and kosher menus, and the Great Hall has the scale for a big, generous, ceremonial feast.

The architecture rewards that freedom because it is so varied. Wolsey and Henry left the Tudor bones, the Great Hall, the gatehouses, the clock and the kitchens, all warm red brick and carved oak. Wren then laid the Baroque state apartments over the eastern half for William and Mary, cool stone, painted ceilings by Antonio Verrio, and Fountain Court's serene arcaded quadrangle. A wedding can lean into either mood: the muscular drama of the Tudor hall, or the gilded elegance of the state rooms, sometimes both in a single evening as guests move from ceremony to reception.

Then there are the gardens, which no photograph quite prepares you for. Sixty acres of them: the Privy Garden's clipped parterres before the Baroque south front, the Great Fountain Garden with its enormous domed yews, the Pond Gardens and, of course, the famous maze. Drinks receptions spill onto the lawns, and golden hour along the river gives a wedding album a backdrop five centuries in the making, with Henry VIII's Historic Kitchens waiting for the evening reception.

There is one honest caveat: the palace has no bedrooms, because it is a monument rather than a hotel. But The Mitre sits at the very gates, a riverside hotel dating from 1665, with more hotels a short way off in East Molesey and Kingston, and Hampton Court station is minutes across the bridge. For a couple who want a wedding that feels genuinely, unmistakably royal, in a Tudor and Baroque palace on the Thames within reach of London, there is very little in England to touch it.