Zero Waste Trafalgar Square Wedding After Lockdown: Mr & Mrs Smith

We talked for a long time about whether or not we should postpone our wedding. We had to cancel our hotel reception and we got an Uber home around 7 pm and ate pizza in our living room. It wasn’t the day we’d imagined but it was perfect because we got to be married to each other in a time when everything felt incredibly uncertain.

Words by Mr & Mrs Smith. Images by Ilaria Petrucci Photography.

We married 3 weeks after the ok was given for ceremonies to go ahead in England at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square in London. We got married here as we began attending the church after a close friend became the vicar and we wanted to be married by her! Mrs Smith sang at the vicar’s wedding a few years before.

I found our wedding florist Gemma on Instagram. She has a natural aesthetic that I really loved and I also appreciated how much she valued ethical flower sourcing and minimal waste. I think ours was her first entirely plastic-free wedding. We also spoke a lot through lockdown and our brief changed dramatically! I’d hope to do a big arch of flowers and bits in the aisles of the church but because we couldn’t take these to a reception afterwards, we decided to pare back. I asked Gemma to make each of our guests a buttonhole or corsage instead and so they wore our flowers!

I walked myself down the aisle. I am Canadian, and because of quarantine restrictions, my family were not able to attend. I think I might have been tempted to walk on my own anyways though! I walked down the aisle to Praise My Soul the King of Heaven. A hymn that my mother and her mother walked down the aisle to as well. It was recorded by my sisters and mom in Canada.

My sisters and mother recorded all of the hymns and ceremony music and emailed it to us to play during the wedding. We couldn’t sing because of fears of vapours spreading Covid so this was a beautiful way to include my family!

We had messages and good wishes read out from our Zoom participants at the beginning of the ceremony. This was so special, we got to hear from family members in England who couldn’t attend because of numbers being restricted and from family including my grandparents and family all across Canada.

I met Ilaria our wedding photographer at a dance class a few years ago in London and found in her a kindred spirit! She is absolutely wonderful, accommodating and made us feel incredibly comfortable on the day. During lockdown, we were in touch quite a lot, and she made sure we knew that she’d be with us if we had to postpone or if we could only have witnesses. She also made us feel so at ease and captured so many intimate and beautiful moments on our wedding day. She also went with my suggestion to not avoid Covid related photos, it was such an extraordinary event and I wanted to remember the family members on zoom and that our guests had to wear masks!

We are passionate about limiting our consumption of single-use items and we also loved that our church would donate the profits of our wedding. We wanted to have limited waste generated by our wedding and we didn’t want to invest money in things that wouldn’t be used again. So we used a lot of things we already had, we borrowed what we didn’t have and we put money towards things that would benefit others or have limited waste. We didn’t really have any other goals in our planning! I wanted soft pastels and greens in our flowers but otherwise, we just asked our witnesses to wear what they had and we were lucky that we didn’t really need to decorate.