How British weddings are bucking trends

Tradition dictates that Prince William would always have got married in the end. But that’s not so for the rest of Britain. His grandmother’s subjects aren’t tying the knot in anywhere near the numbers we were. The statistics are down from more than 350,000 in 1981 to just above 230,000 in 2009 – the last year for which figures are available.

But what of the couples bucking that trend? Samuel Jonson said a second marriage was the “triumph of hope over experience”. But what about the first time people wed?

Channel 4 News met three couples before they got married to ask them why they were doing it – we then filmed them all on their big day: a visual feast.

Melanie and James McMorrow opted for a church wedding in Kent. They told us they wanted to make a commitment to each other in public. James is Catholic, Melanie Church of England. They opted for St Paul’s Church because of the ties with Melanie’s family – her grandparents and parents wed there, she and her brother were christened there.

The McMorrows are bucking the trend which has seen the numbers marrying in church also fall dramatically. Channel 4 News has been told that the royal couple are both religious and, despite the pomp, pageantry and public nature of their wedding, want it to be a spiritual event. So can that help the Church of England turn around its fortunes? Will the royal wedding entice more marrying couples back into church?

And perhaps the Church of England should take a leaf out of the book of other non-Christian denominations in the UK. Hindus for example – like Syd and Manisha Ragvani who would never have married anywhere except their local hindu temple in Cardiff.

This couple – just 27 and 24 – seemed wise beyond their years. Whether it was their traditional upbringing, family and faith-based, or their own innate sense, both had clear ideas on what makes a successful marriage: trust, love, honour, respect, honesty, words that came thoughtfully from their mouths.

Their marriage – in front of at least 800 members of the Hindu community – an explosion of petals and jewels and elaborate ceremony. But Syd Ragvani told us he would “marry Manisha in rags if I had to”.

Our last – and the pair most typifying the trend in modern british marriages – were Deborah and Mark Zbinden who wed at London Zoo. That’s one of the statistics about marriage that is seeing a rise: the number of ceremonies in “approved premises” (zoos, castles, hotels) has risen to almost exactly the number by which church weddings have fallen. In 2009, more than 111,000 people got hitched without religion.

For the Zbindens, it was an excuse for a party and – after 10 years together – a celebration of their commitment to each other.

All our couples did things in different ways but they were all united by optimism (of course, none thought they would divorce), by a traditional sense that marriage was the way to start a family, and by the love they felt for each other.

Good luck to them.