In some ways, the term “ethical wedding” is as contradictory as, say, “sexy footbath” or “welcome ingrown hair”. And yet, after years of railing against the marital-industrial complex, I still wanted to give it a go. When, in a rather unlikely move, after seven years of cohabitation and nearly five years of co-parenting, my partner and I decided to get married, we were both keen to keep it as environmentally friendly, inexpensive and ideologically sound as we could. If you’re expecting rings woven from toenail clippings and a wedding meal pulled out of a wheelie bin, I’m sorry to disappoint. But the whole thing did cost us around the same as my parents’ wedding in 1992 and about the only thing we bought new was the wine. And we had that delivered by bike.
Our wedding came in two parts. First, there was the legal bit: since the first few months of our relationship played out almost entirely in places located along the 38 bus route, it seemed fitting to do this in Hackney town hall in east London. So my parents, partner, son and I all got the train from Oxford and on to the tube carrying our wedding gear in rucksacks and holdalls. I got changed in the toilets of a cinema over the road, my ex-boyfriend and his wife were included in our Covid-safe list of 14 guests, my son lay down in the middle of the carpet during the ceremony and chatted loudly to himself to stave off his inevitable four-year-old boredom and I wore an outfit I’d made for a grand total of £8. Including underwear.
The average price of a wedding dress in the UK – according to an army of websites specifically dedicated to the noble art of fleecing their readers – is somewhere in the region of £1,300. I made five wedding outfits for a grand total of £29. The first, for our legal section, was made of pale apricot fabric I bought from a market in east London: I sewed three gold hearts down the front – one for my partner, one for my son and one for me. I made a veil out of a £1 offcut and a headband from a charity shop. My shoes cost £1 from a car boot sale. After the ceremony, we all walked around the corner to eat pizza and drink booze in a nearby pub, before getting the train back to Oxford.
The second part of the wedding took place three weeks later and was a slightly bigger affair. By which I mean we spent more than £100 and it didn’t end at 5pm. I was keen to get married somewhere we could cycle to, as we are both virgins who can’t drive. And anyway, since, as a fan of breathing and moving safely through the world, I would much prefer people walked, cycled or got the bus whenever they can. Which is how I ended up emailing a scout troop that has a hall down by the river, next to an allotment, where my friend Sharon learned to canoe in the 1970s.
It was perfect. There was a field to camp in, a kitchen, a giant bell (because you just never know), a large pink windsurfing sail hung on the wall, toilets, a kitchen full of mismatched tea towels, and the whole thing opened out on to a shallow, silty stretch of the Thames, overhung with willow trees and blackberries. They let us rent it for two days for less than £1,000 and their only real request was that my partner and I consider volunteering as scout leaders. I decorated the tables with bed sheets and curtains, plates, glasses, cutlery and vases all bought from the charity shops within cycling distance of our house. I stuffed the vases with grasses and wildflowers picked the day before from beside the towpath and my friend hung the room about with beautiful coloured decorations used a few weeks earlier at a mutual friend’s memorial.
Just by coming to our wedding and eating off those tables, each guest probably inadvertently donated about £2 to either Emmaus, Oxfam, Mercy in Action, the Shaw Trust or our local children’s hospice, Helen and Douglas House. Did this mean spending the days before and after the wedding kneeling in my garden, in 34C heat, washing what felt like 1,000 forks and wine glasses in a bucket? It did. But was it worth it to take the whole lot back to those various charity shops, to be sold on again? I think so.
For this wedding, I wanted outfits. Several outfits. I made a white linen dress with the words “An Honest Woman” stitched across the front. I made a veil by recycling that same charity shop headband and a strip of fabric bought from my local high street just a few doors down from Oxford’s only sex shop. The night before the wedding, I was to be found refreshing the BBC weather page like a compulsive gambler on a fruit machine – willing the outcome to be different while knowing, deep down, that I was doomed. The forecast for our wedding day, and indeed the preceding three days, was 35C. My sister got married in India in a cooler temperature. And so, with just a few hours to go, I decided to cut up one of our white bedsheets and turn it into a voluminous, short tent of a dress, in which I could sweat merrily without actually sticking to the furniture or, I hoped, passing out. I’d bought a white bikini on eBay for £4, realised it showed about 10% of my pubes and so quickly knocked up a white lace cover-up from a piece of material I’d originally thought might work as a cake cover to keep away the flies. Finally, inspired in no small part by Gram Parsons’ nudie suit, I made a pair of trousers and a top covered in applique flowers, hearts and our initials. The fabric came from a local charity that salvages cloth and other materials from businesses that would otherwise end up in landfill. It cost me about £10 and took so long to hand sew all those bloody petals that I listened to the entire audiobook of Jaws while I did it.
A party isn’t a wedding unless you have food and so, after toying with the idea of catering for all 100 guests on my own (until I pictured myself standing in a scout kitchen, in a pair of sports shorts, surrounded by bowls of cucumbers and bags of rice as people started to arrive) I approached Damascus Rose – a social enterprise supporting refugee women in Oxford. We ate delicious Middle Eastern food, served up by a Syrian woman who, rather out of the blue, asked if she could make a speech halfway through the meal. My mother arrived from Cardiff with three layers of orange and polenta cake, which she then decorated with blackberries picked from the nature reserve behind my house and a figurine my sister made of my partner and me in our new inflatable canoe. Another friend made three sensational cakes as a gift and, standing behind a folding table in a wet bikini (like many of the guests, I’d just been swimming), I served them to our overheated and shade-hungry guests. It was one of my favourite parts of the whole day.
When you are chaotic, ambivalent about weddings and keen to do things ethically, there are inevitably things that get forgotten or missed. The 50 jam jars I had been studiously accumulating and washing for the last six months to fill with tea lights in the evening remained hidden somewhere in a bag. The sweltering temperature inside the hall during the meal became so unbearable that neither I nor my mother got to make our speeches (quite rightly, everyone burst out of the building and into the river after about two hours of slow roasting). I forgot my bike lights and so had to recruit a host of cyclists to head up the hill and collect the chips and mushy peas that were served when the sun went down.
But, in the end, I think we pulled it off. A friend’s mum – a former midwife and staunch feminist, who is training to be a funeral celebrant – brought us together for a little informal ceremony of our own making where, against my every intention, I cried. A group of children played handbells borrowed from another married couple. Two old friends offered to take photos during the day and did so, at times, in their swimming shorts. And my husband and I spent our wedding night in a tent, sleeping on either side of an inflatable mattress on which our four-year-old son slowly rotated like a catherine wheel, having forgotten to brush our teeth.
So, is it possible to have an environmentally friendly, ethically sound, inexpensive wedding? Only with hard work, a lot of help from loved ones and by turning a blind eye to mess. You know, kind of like a marriage.