Our Preston Court Wedding: Sunflowers, Fire and Carousels

Jonny Wall

44 minutes ago

7 min read

Worth It score: 10/10 | Cost: A lot of money. Let's leave it at that. | Sober-friendly: 5/5 | Food-intolerance-friendly: 5/5 | Would we go back? Every year if they'd let us.

If you read about our engagement, you'll know I proposed to Kelly along a trail of sunflowers, and I told you then there was a theme. Well, on 5 August 2025 the theme came home to roost. Kelly and I got married at Preston Court, near Canterbury in Kent, surrounded by 40 to 50 of our favourite people and roughly a million sunflowers. The weather was perfect. The food was perfect. Everything was perfect. I know every couple says that, but I've been sat here trying to think of one thing that went wrong and I've got nothing. So here's how the best day of our lives went, moment by moment. They were all worth it.

Arriving at Preston Court

Preston Court isn't really a venue so much as a 600-acre playground that happens to do weddings. There's a proper country house, a lawn that goes on forever, a lake with an island, a 17th-century Kentish barn with two 1920s hand-painted theatre organs inside it, and a barnyard full of twinkly lights. Oh, and a Victorian carousel. More on that later, because it deserves its own paragraph (or three).

Walking out and seeing the ceremony chairs lined up on the grass in the sunshine was the moment it stopped being a spreadsheet and started being real. Blue sky, sunshine, lily pads on the water. If you'd ordered the weather off a menu, you couldn't have done better.

Sunflowers, a Gazebo and the Big Bit

The flowers were done by Floral Explosion, a family-run florist from Kent, and they absolutely nailed the brief, which was basically "sunflowers, and then more sunflowers". Buttonholes, bouquets and the white gazebo where we said our vows, all bursting with yellow. It looked like the sun had come down to watch.

I'm not going to pretend I can give you a word-by-word replay of the ceremony. What I remember is Kelly, the sunflowers, the sunshine and the people we love sitting in rows in front of us. That'll do me.

Rings (and Ink)

Then the rings. We're both pretty covered in tattoos, so the ring exchange photos look like a very romantic advert for a tattoo studio, which is fitting given what happened next.

Straight after the ceremony, Adam from Three Crows Tattoo on Castle Street in Canterbury set up at the venue and tattooed us. We got each other's initials on our fingers: I got a K and Kelly got a J, both drawn in leaves and vines, so at a glance they look like little sprigs of greenery until you know what you're looking at. Rings can come off. These can't. Is getting tattooed at your own wedding normal? Probably not. Should it be? Absolutely. (Fight me.)

The Afternoon Tea Picnic

Rather than herding everyone indoors for canapés, we had an afternoon tea picnic on the lawn in front of the house. Rugs, baskets, sunshine, guests sprawled on the grass like a very well-dressed festival. It was exactly the relaxed, chatty vibe we wanted between the ceremony and dinner, and it meant we actually got to talk to people rather than just waving at them across a room.

Roll Up, Roll Up: Carnival Games

Over in the barnyard, Salty Carnival Kiss had set up their hand-painted fairground games. The games are all handmade and painted in these gorgeous candy colours, so as well as being loads of fun, they look amazing in the photos. I have photographic evidence of grown adults absolutely losing it over a buzz-wire game. Ten out of ten, no notes.

The White Merry-Go-Round Was Epic

Right, the carousel. Preston Court has a genuine Victorian "galloper", built in the 1880s by the British makers Allchin & Linnell, with 36 hand-carved horses and over a thousand little lights. It's not a replica, it's a proper piece of history, and it still goes round. So of course Kelly and I got on it in our wedding clothes and rode it like we were eight years old.

It was epic. There's no other word for it. Our guests were on and off it all evening, grinning their heads off, and as the light started to fade, all those little bulbs really came into their own. If you're ever lucky enough to get married here, ride it. Ride it lots.

The Tayberry Open-Fire Feast

Now, you know me. The food is the bit I care about most. Dinner was cooked by Tayberry Foods, who are based in Kent and specialise in open-fire cooking and big sharing feasts. They're also proper about their ingredients. Their meat comes from Preston Butchers and their organic veg from Wingham Country Market, both just a few miles from their kitchen.

Watching the chefs work that grill, all smoke and flames and huge joints of meat, was a show in itself. Then it all came to the tables in the barn on sharing boards: a mix of meats and grilled vegetables, piled high and passed around.

As regular readers know, I have a list of food intolerances longer than a best man's speech: cheese, eggs, bread and more. Tayberry offered to work around all of it. On the day, I genuinely wasn't bothered. It's my wedding, I'm not going to spend it interrogating a sharing board. But it turned out I didn't need to. Everything they served was stuff I could eat, with very little dairy anywhere. That doesn't happen to me often at a big event, and it felt like a wedding present in itself.

No Cake, No Problem

Here's a controversial one: we didn't have a wedding cake. A traditional wedding cake is, in my professional opinion, a waste of f*cking time. You spend a fortune on it, cut it for one photo, and then half of it goes home in napkins.

Instead we had cupcakes from Mama Feelgoods, a family-run café and cake shop at Chalkpit Farm in Bekesbourne, near Canterbury. Vanilla, chocolate and carrot cake, stacked on stands next to (you guessed it) sunflowers. Everyone got their own, nobody had to fight over the edge bits, and there was a flavour for everyone.

Raising a Glass (of Appletiser)

I'm sober, but this wasn't a sober wedding. We were more than happy for everyone else to have a drink, and they did.

What was lovely is that nobody got wasted. Everyone was just in really good spirits (pun absolutely intended) all day and night.

For the toasts, Kelly and I raised glasses of Appletiser. It fizzes, it's gold, it looks the part in a glass, and nobody's going to be sick on the dancefloor from it. Honestly, it's the unsung hero of the sober celebration.

Our First Dance: Iris

Our first dance was "Iris": the Goo Goo Dolls wrote it, but we danced to the Jada Facer version. We danced it alone under the lit-up maypole, and I mean alone. Nobody was allowed within 20 yards. Our guests watched from a distance while the lights twinkled above us, and for one song it was just the two of us in the middle of it all. I'll be replaying that one for the rest of my life.

Riptide Take the Barn

Then it was time to party. Riptide are a four-piece wedding and party band from Brighton, and they brought the party to the barn. Their repertoire runs from the 50s right up to current chart stuff, so there was something to get everyone up. I'd also like to formally note that their drummer is called Jonny, which means that at one point there were two Jonnys at the centre of attention and only one of them could keep time. (It wasn't me.)

Unlimited Pizza (Yes, Really)

As if we hadn't eaten enough, the evening brought unlimited pizza from the venue's own wood-fired pizza trailer. There's something about a slice of hot pizza after a stint on the dancefloor that just hits different. Nobody went home hungry. I'm not sure anybody went home able to move.

Glamping Under the Stars

And then, instead of a taxi to a hotel, we just wandered over to the onsite glamping. Preston Court has bell tents with proper double beds set out in a wildflower meadow, so the end of the night was a short, happy stroll rather than a logistics exercise. Falling asleep there, married, with the party still humming in our ears, was the perfect full stop.

If You're Planning a Wedding (and You're Sober or Have Food Intolerances)

A few things we learned that might help:

Talk to your caterer early. Tayberry offered to work around my intolerances, and that peace of mind is worth having. Raise it at the start, not the week before.
Sharing feasts built on meat and veg are your friend. When the menu is grilled meats and grilled vegetables rather than pastry, sauces and cheese boards, there's naturally far less to avoid.
Non-alcoholic toasts are completely normal. Appletiser looked the part and felt every bit as celebratory. Pick something you actually like drinking.
Being sober doesn't mean your wedding has to be dry. We were happy for guests to drink, and the atmosphere was brilliant.
You don't need a cake. Cupcakes in a few flavours are easier to serve, easier to share, and give everyone a choice.
Give people something to do. Carnival games, a carousel and a picnic kept everyone entertained and chatting all day.

Was It Worth It?

Is that even a question? Preston Court gave us the most perfect day we could have imagined, and every single supplier played a blinder. Sunflowers, ink, fire, fairground rides, cupcakes, Appletiser and Iris: every moment was worth it, twice.

If you've got a wedding coming up, or you've pulled off a sober or intolerance-friendly celebration of your own, tell us about it in the comments. We'd love to hear how you did it.