Marquees and tipis on private land
Published
The marquee route offers total freedom and total responsibility, in exactly equal measure.
What you are actually taking on
A licensed venue sells you a solved problem. A field sells you a location and nothing else. Everything that a venue quietly provides has to be identified, hired, delivered, installed, powered, serviced and removed.
The full list is longer than most people expect:
- The structure itself, its flooring, and its lining
- Power — generator, distribution, cabling, and a plan for what happens if it fails
- Lighting, inside and along every route guests will walk in the dark
- Heating, which in every month except July and August is not optional in England
- Lavatories, and the water and waste servicing they need
- Water for catering, and a catering tent with its own power
- Furniture, linen, glassware, crockery, cutlery, bars and back-of-house
- Parking, marked out, with a plan for wet ground
- Waste removal, and the reinstatement of the field afterwards
Each of those is a supplier, a delivery slot, a payment and a point of failure. Somebody has to own the schedule. If nobody is paid to own it, the couple owns it.
The ground is the whole gamble
Marquee flooring sits on the ground. Vehicles delivering the marquee, the loos, the generator and the catering drive across the same ground, usually over several days, and then drive back out.
In an English spring or autumn, three days of rain in the week before turns a firm field into something a lorry cannot leave without a tractor. This is the single most common way a marquee wedding gets expensive at short notice, and it is not insurable in any useful sense.
Practical mitigation:
- Choose a site with a hard track to it, or budget for trackway matting.
- Establish who pays if a vehicle needs recovery, before anyone drives on.
- Ask the marquee company what their cut-off is for pulling out on ground conditions, and what happens to your money at that point.
- Walk the site after heavy rain, not on a dry afternoon in May.
Slope matters too. A field with a gentle fall is fine for grazing and awkward for a dance floor, and levelling is chargeable.
Planning permission
Temporary use of land for events falls under permitted development rights for a limited number of days per calendar year — historically twenty-eight, and varied from time to time. A single wedding sits comfortably inside that.
Two things pull you outside it. Erecting a structure for an extended period, and repeating the use often enough that it stops being temporary. A landowner running several events a summer should confirm the position with the district council rather than assume.
Separately, the site may sit within the Cotswolds National Landscape, a conservation area, or the curtilage of a listed building, all of which add considerations. Listed buildings and what they restrict covers the last of these.
Licensing
A field has no premises licence. If alcohol is being sold, or if regulated entertainment is being provided in a way that requires authorisation, you need a Temporary Event Notice from the district council, submitted well in advance and subject to limits on numbers and duration.
The commonly used alternative is not to sell alcohol at all: a private event where drink is provided free requires no licence for the sale of alcohol, because no sale occurs. A bar that takes money does. The distinction is precise and worth getting right — see alcohol licensing and corkage.
Noise
Canvas is acoustically transparent. A band inside a marquee is audible a long way across open country, and marquee sites generate proportionally more noise complaints than buildings do.
There is no limiter to protect you and no landlord to take the call. If the site is within earshot of houses, tell the neighbours what is happening and when it will end, in writing, weeks ahead. It is not a legal requirement and it works better than anything that is. Noise limits and end times explains the rest.
The weather plan is different here
At a barn or a manor house, the wet weather plan means moving the ceremony indoors. At a marquee site there is no indoors. The marquee is the plan, which means the marquee has to be big enough to hold the ceremony, the meal and the dancing simultaneously if the day is wet.
That is a larger and more expensive structure than the sunny-day version, and it is the version to price. Wet weather plans sets out how to test one.
Structures other than marquees
Tipis, stretch tents and sailcloth structures each behave differently. Tipis need height and a certain kind of ground for their anchors, cope well with wind and less well with sustained heavy rain at the crown. Stretch tents are elegant, quick and offer far less weather protection than they appear to. Traditional pole marquees need more space around them than their footprint suggests.
The relevant question for any of them is the same: at what wind speed does the supplier take it down, and who decides?
Where the money goes
Marquee weddings are frequently chosen for cost and frequently do not save any. The structure is often the smaller half of the total once flooring, power, heating, lighting, loos, furniture and staffing are added, and none of those lines appear in the first quote unless you ask for them.
Ask every marquee supplier for a fully itemised quote for a wet October Saturday, even if your date is in June. That version is the true cost of the option, for the reasons set out in where the money sits.