Wedding chauffeur hire

Between the arrival at the church and the departure for the reception, a wedding car spends most of its day stationary. Where it stands matters more than people expect. A car parked at the lychgate looks right in photographs and blocks the only vehicle access for the next hour, which is a problem the moment a florist arrives or an elderly guest needs dropping at the door.

Our chauffeurs park where they can be reached in under two minutes and where nothing else is trapped behind them. At a village church that is usually the far end of the lane with the nose pointing out. At a hotel it is the service side rather than the front steps, unless the hotel has said otherwise.

The other half of that answer is time. Between ceremony and reception, cars typically wait between forty minutes and an hour and a half, and it is the photographs that decide it. Because the car is booked by the hour, none of that waiting produces a new conversation about money.

Ribbons go on in the morning, at the first collection address, and take about ten minutes to fit properly. They are not put on the night before, because a ribbon driven at seventy miles an hour for an hour arrives looking like something that has been driven at seventy miles an hour for an hour.

Colour is yours to choose and worth choosing deliberately. Ivory and white photograph well against a dark car and disappear against a silver one. Anything narrower than about 50mm reads as a thin line in a wide shot and is generally a waste of the effort.

What we will not do is anything adhesive on the paint, or a decoration attached to the boot lid that has to be removed before the car can be opened. Flowers on a bonnet are fine if they are supplied and stood on a proper base; a florist arriving with a staple gun is not.

A great many wedding venues were built long before anything with a 3.5 metre wheelbase existed. Deep gravel, a cattle grid, a five-tonne weight limit on the only bridge, a gateway a Phantom clears by four inches: all of these are common and none of them appear on a map.

Where a venue is new to us the approach gets driven in advance, usually on a weekday morning. The chauffeur looks for the turning circle at the door, the width at the gate, the surface between the two, and where a large car can turn round without a fourteen-point manoeuvre in front of a hundred guests.

Occasionally the recce produces bad news, and it is better heard in April than in August. If a long-wheelbase car genuinely cannot reach the church door, we will say so and propose the car that can rather than promising something that ends with a bride walking the last forty yards.

Departure times at the end of a wedding are the least accurate numbers on any running order. A couple leaving at eleven leave at half past midnight, and the car booked to eleven has usually gone. We would rather hold the later hour and release it than send a chauffeur home at the moment they are needed.

Where the couple are going on somewhere, the practical details are small and they matter: which case goes in which car, who has the room key, whether the hotel front desk is staffed at one in the morning. Those get written down in advance because nobody is in a state to work them out at the time.

The last thing a chauffeur does is a sweep of the car. Phones, one shoe, a bouquet, a speech in a jacket pocket: all of it turns up, all of it gets logged, and all of it is returned rather than left in a boot until somebody rings.