Wedding Licence for The Trinity Centre - to be or not to be?
Should we licence Trinity for Civil ceremonies?
Lots of people already have informal ceremonies at The Trinity Centre. We also get lots of enquiries as to whether people can have the whole ceremony here - currently we direct people to the Bristol Registry Office for the licensed part of their marriage.
If we do not proceed with a licence, people will still be able to continue to have the legal part of their Civil Marriage/Civil Partnership at the Registry Office. Then they can come to Trinity to have a second ceremony - in whatever format they choose - and/or their wedding reception.
If we proceed with the licence we will be able to offer people the whole package - people will be able to get legally married at the venue, with a ceremony of their choosing. However...the caveat is that the ceremony cannot contain any religious/faith aspects. This includes Humanist/Druid/Pagan ceremonial elements, Hand-Fasting, as well as prayers, readings from pastors/ordained minsters.
We need to decide whether we choose to allow people what they want whilst in essence also restricting possibly on another aspect of what people might want.
In order to get an idea of public opinion, I have created a one-question survey, which you can respond to by clicking here: (closes Friday 6 December).
I am happy to hold a meeting about this if people are interested. Please do feel free to circulate this to anyone else whom you think may be interested in having their say. You can find out more about our current wedding offer here.
Thank you in advance for your input!
Emma Harvey, Centre Manager
