Old Finsbury Town Hall Wedding With Stunning Art Deco Anoushka G Dress: Matt & Lauren

Today’s real wedding features a gorgeously glam bride wearing a stunning, beaded Anoushka G wedding dress. She looks absolutely breathtaking in it!

Matt & Lauren chose the iconic Old Finsbury Town Hall to say their I do’s and were naturally inspired by its opulent art nouveau and grand art deco style – they kept the styling to a minimum and let the venue do the talking.

With a subtle blush, grey and black colour scheme, this beautiful city wedding will definitely inspire…

Old Finsbury Town Hall Wedding With Stunning Art Deco Anoushka G Dress: Matt & Lauren

Words by Lauren. Images by The Wardette Studio.

We weren’t keen on choosing a ‘theme’ for the wedding, but ended up being guided by the vintage 1920s/30s style of the venue a bit and then just went with what we wanted. Having black bridesmaid dresses caused a bit of controversy, but we knew what we wanted and stuck to our guns!

My wedding dress was an Anouska G dress purchased from Blackburn Bridal (bought at Brides Sample Sale).

We only had a limited budget for a dress, but I had a rough idea of what I wanted. I’d been to one shop to try some on and then had booked a ticket for the Brides Magazine Sample Sale, hoping to find my dream dress for a bargain price!

I went with my Maid of Honour and as we walked through the doors of the ballroom (it was held in a London hotel), I saw a woman holding up a dress in front of me. I said to my Maid of Honour ‘that’s it’ and I knew that it was my dress.

Luckily the lady put it back down on the rail so we swooped in and grabbed it. I tried it on and that was it, sold. I never thought I would have the feeling of ‘this is the one’, but I just knew it was. I love the fact that it was so elegant and simple, but a bit unusual.

And I love all the sparkling beads! It has a vintage feel to it and as our venue was a 1920s/30s town hall, it all just seemed to fit.  I had always said that I would sell my dress after the day, but now I can’t bring myself to do it because I loved it so much.

Our florist Vicky is a friend of an old colleague of mine. She was recommended after we struggled to find a florist who offered the flowers that we wanted at a reasonable price. For her bouquet Lauren knew that she wanted fairly neutral colours, with a vintage feel but left the actual type of flowers completely up to Vicky.

We met up to discuss ideas and then Vicky just ran with it and came up with the most beautiful bouquets full of tea roses, hydrangeas and all sorts of other wonderful blooms. We also asked her to create all of the small vases of flowers for the tables and she want above and beyond to source the vases, deliver them and dress the venue on the day.

Vicky gave everything a really personal touch and I couldn’t recommend her highly enough. In fact, she did such a good job that Lauren’s maid of honour recently used her for her wedding!

Matt and I met at the Isle of Wight Festival back in 2007 and luckily we both lived in Hertfordshire so could continue to see each other after that. We went back to the festival every year after that and in 2012, 5 years after we met, Matt popped the question at the top of the ferris wheel. All of our friends were in on it and I was the only one not to know what was going on! I said yes! And then we had an amazing celebration with champagne – it really was the most wonderful weekend.

With Matt being a cameraman, he had set up a Go-Pro on the ferris wheel to film the whole proposal, which is an amazing thing to be able to look back on. He edited that into a short film and we used it as our save the date. Which you can watch here

My Dad, Bob walked me down the aisle to a piece of instrumental music from the film ‘Up’. We wanted something non-traditional and the music was really beautiful so we just went with it.

We bounced back down the aisle to ‘Higher and higher’ by Jackie Wilson which was so much fun!

Our wedding venue was The Old Finsbury Town Hall, Islington, London, England. We chose the venue as we wanted a London wedding and both our families are from North London.

We were looking for a venue with the wow factor, but somewhere that was informal enough that we could have a really good party. When we first saw The Old Finsbury Town Hall, it completely fit the bill – the main hall was so beautiful and a perfect size for all of our guests.

Plus, we could have the ceremony there too, in a smaller more intimate room and then the guests could just walk across the hall for the reception. It was also big enough to hold all 150 of our guests!

After the ceremony, we took some time out to have a walk down to nearby Exmouth market and have some photos taken.

This was such a great thing to do because it gave us some space just to breathe and take in what had just happened. The guests were busy enjoying canapés and prosecco and it was lovely to have  a bit of time just the two of us.

Our wedding photographer was Gemma Ward from The Wardette Studio. One thing we both loved was how Gemma put everyone at ease, she was very reassuring and always in the right place at the right time without us even noticing! We wanted most of our photos to be quite natural and she really captured the happy, celebratory feel of the whole day.

We honestly couldn’t have asked for more from our photographer and we’re so pleased with every picture that she’s given us. We both feel genuinely privileged that we had such a talented, creative person there to capture our wedding.

The venue didn’t really need too much dressing as it was so beautiful. We hired some large crystal candelabras for the table centrepieces and surrounded them with small vases of flowers.

Lauren had also handmade some bunting using lace to decorate the top table, sweet table and cake table. We also made our own seating plan and we handmade heart-shaped confetti to decorate the tables out of old romance novels.

Rather than individual wedding favours, we created our own sweet table so that guests could help themselves to a bag of sweets. It was really funny to see all of our guests making up a sneaky bag of sweets to take home with them!

Michelle our cake maker was recommended to us by a friend. We knew that we didn’t want a traditional iced wedding cake and had seen some pictures of tiered Victoria sponges that we really liked.

We met Michelle at her house and talked through ideas whilst sipping tea from vintage tea cups and sampling cake – a good start!

Michelle made us a one-tier taster cake as a sample and it was perfect. We immediately booked her and also asked her to create a selection of other cakes for our dessert table – carrot, bakewell tart, chocolate fudge cake, lemon cake – which were all delicious.

As with our other suppliers, Michelle really went above and beyond on the day, setting up and dressing the cake table exactly how we had pictured. We would highly recommend Maya Cakes!

If you could impart any words of wisdom to future brides planning their wedding days, what would they be?

Before the wedding, a good friend told us to make sure that during the day you both take some time to stand in a corner or at the side of the room and just watch what’s going on.

It really does go so fast and if you don’t make the effort you won’t take it all in and realise what an amazing day it really is.

What was your most memorable moment of the day / evening?

The first dance, the bride and groom DJ-off, the speeches, the party – everything really!

Matt has his own video production company and so used one of his cameramen to film the day and then edited the wedding video himself. Matt enjoyed editing our wedding film so much that he has since set-up a wedding film company and they’re doing really well!

wedding credits / photographer: the wardette studio / wedding venue: the old finsbury town hall / brides dress: anoushka g via blackburn bridal / grooms suit: hugo boss / brides shoes: dune / grooms shoes: loake / bridesmaid dresses: great plains at house of fraser/ bridesmaid shoes: own / hair & makeup: sharon ross makeup / florist: vicki barrett – [email protected] / wedding cake: maya cakes / catering: octopus / rings: on-line / videography: high hat weddings

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