Choose the perfect quirky Gloucestershire wedding venues
The diverse landscape has inspired a collection of truly quirky Gloucestershire wedding venues for couples seeking to celebrate their day in distinctive style. For couples who value originality and personal expression over wedding traditions, quirky Gloucestershire wedding venues provide the perfect canvas for creating celebrations that reflect individuality while still honouring the county’s unique character and natural beauty.
Owlpen Manor
Owlpen Manor is a bewitchingly otherworldly Tudor manor house secreted away in a hidden Cotswold valley that feels suspended in time. This extraordinary Grade I listed building offers couples a wedding experience that feels more like stepping into a folk tale than a conventional celebration.
Main Offerings for Weddings:
- Ceremony and Reception Spaces: The historic Cyder Barn, dating from 1446, serves as the primary ceremony and reception space with its massive cruck frame and atmospheric stone walls that seem to whisper stories from the past. For more intimate gatherings, the Manor’s Great Hall offers a genuinely medieval setting with walls adorned with centuries-old tapestries and peculiar historical artifacts. The venue can accommodate up to 120 guests across its unusual collection of historical spaces.
- Outdoor Spaces: The manor is surrounded by terraced gardens that seem to have grown organically from the landscape over centuries, featuring ancient yew topiary shaped into curious forms and mystical garden structures.
What Makes Owlpen Manor Quirky:
- Untouched Time Capsule Quality: Unlike more polished historic venues, Owlpen maintains a deliberately unmanicured, authentic character with worn stone steps, ancient timbers, and weathered surfaces that create a genuine connection to the past, perfect for couples seeking an alternative to the pristine perfection of typical wedding settings.
- Surprising Accommodation Options: The estate offers nine utterly unique self-catering cottages scattered throughout the grounds, including the extraordinary Grist Mill with its working waterwheel, and the tiny Court House that seems plucked from a fairy tale. These characterful buildings accommodate up to 40 guests and provide unusual getting-ready spaces filled with eccentric details and curious historical features.
- Heritage Experience Packages: Owlpen offers flexible venue-only hiring from £2,950 with the freedom to create bespoke celebrations across their unusual historical spaces. Their “Tudor Weekend” package includes two nights’ accommodation in their nine self-catering cottages (sleeping 40 guests), exclusive use of the manor grounds. This might be one of the best quirky Gloucestershire wedding venues.
Review Highlights:
- ”Owlpen feels like your own private slice of idyllic countryside, where you are able to create your wedding day exactly as you want it. We loved having the whole venue for two nights and having close friends and family staying on the estate in cottages meant we had time to really enjoy the whole weekend, setting the wedding up the day before and spending time with everyone who had travelled to be there with us.” Owlpen Manor
- ”Our wedding at Owlpen Manor was truly a dream come true! The venue itself is absolutely breathtaking—steeped in history, surrounded by stunning countryside, and with so much charm. It created the perfect backdrop for our special day, and our guests were in awe of its beauty.” Google
Matara
Matara defies conventional venue categorization by blending a Grade II listed Regency house with Japanese-inspired gardens and contemporary circular spaces designed according to sacred geometry principles. This boundary-crossing venue creates a wedding experience that feels like a journey through different worlds rather than a typical celebration.
Main Offerings for Weddings:
- Ceremony and Reception Spaces: The venue offers several extraordinary options including the utterly unique Cloistered Courtyard, a perfect circle with a central water feature and glass roof that creates a sanctuary-like atmosphere for ceremonies of up to 150 guests. Additional spaces include the Japanese-inspired banqueting hall with its unexpected Asian influences nestled within the Cotswold countryside, and meditative spaces designed specifically to create a sense of peace rarely associated with wedding venues.
- Outdoor Spaces: Matara’s grounds present a constantly surprising journey through different landscape experiences, from contemplative Zen gardens and koi ponds to wildflower meadows and hidden meditation spaces. These diverse environments allow couples to create celebrations that move between different worlds and atmospheres throughout the day.
What Makes Matara Quirky:
- East-Meets-West Fusion: The unexpected combination of quintessential English Regency architecture with Japanese garden design, contemporary sacred geometry, and Eastern philosophical influences creates a genuinely unique setting unlike any other wedding venue in the UK.
- Spiritual Dimension: Unlike conventional venues focused purely on aesthetics, Matara was specifically designed around principles of mindfulness and consciousness, with spaces intended to create particular emotional and spiritual experiences, perfect for couples seeking a celebration with deeper intentionality.
- Unconventional Room Layouts: The venue’s circular structures and mindfully designed spaces challenge the typical linear arrangements of traditional venues, creating unusual flow patterns and unexpected sight lines that encourage guests to experience the celebration differently than they would in conventional rectangular rooms.
Review Highlights:
- ”The most incredible Venue! My husband and I recently got married at The Matara Centere and cannot praise this beautiful place highly enough!” Google
- ”Matata is such a unique and special wedding venue. We had not seen a venue like it and fell in love instantly. The team were fantastic from start to finish and made us feel completely at ease throughout the entire wedding planning process. The chef is incredible – our guests all said how delicious every part of the food was!” Hitched
Giffords Circus Wedding
Giffords Circus offers perhaps the most theatrical and whimsical wedding option in the Cotswolds, the opportunity to celebrate within an authentic vintage traveling circus, complete with burgundy and gold big top, painted wagons, and the enchanting world of circus performers. This utterly unique concept creates celebrations that break every wedding convention.
Main Offerings for Weddings:
- Ceremony and Reception Spaces: Giffords Circus is known for the magical atmosphere of the big top – a genuine circus tent with sawdust floors, tiered seating, and all the atmospheric trappings of a vintage circus performance. This extraordinary space can be transformed from ceremonial setting to theatrical dining venue to dance floor, accommodating up to 200 guests in a completely immersive environment unlike any traditional wedding setup.
- Outdoor Spaces: The circus creates a self-contained world wherever it travels, with the colorful painted wagons, bunting-festooned entrance ways, and backstage areas creating a complete circus village that becomes the setting for the entire celebration—typically pitched in a beautiful Cotswold meadow or country estate.
What Makes Giffords Circus Weddings Quirky:
- Theatrical Performance Element: Unlike static venues, a Giffords wedding can include actual circus performances integrated into the celebration, from acrobats and jugglers to equestrian displays and the circus’s own musical troupe, creating a wedding that feels more like an enchanting show than a traditional celebration.
- Nomadic Possibility: The travelling nature of the circus means couples can potentially select their ideal location within the Cotswolds (subject to permissions), with the entire wedding venue arriving on wheels to create a magical circus world in their chosen countryside setting.
- Theatrical Feast Dining: Giffords’ renowned traveling restaurant, Circus Sauce, offers a uniquely theatrical catering option unlike any conventional wedding food service. Housed in vintage wagons that accompany the circus, their culinary team creates seasonal feasting menus served family-style at long communal tables, emphasizing locally sourced ingredients from farms along the circus route.
Stroud Subscription Rooms
The Stroud Subscription Rooms offers couples a wonderfully unconventional town center wedding venue within a distinctive Regency building that has served as the cultural and political heart of this bohemian market town since 1834. This community arts venue brings together architectural grandeur with countercultural Stroud spirit.
Main Offerings for Weddings:
- Ceremony and Reception Spaces: The magnificent Ballroom serves as the primary ceremony and reception space with its sprung wooden dance floor, imposing columns, and dramatic balcony overlooking the proceedings, a space designed for public assemblies and performances rather than conventional celebrations. This versatile room can accommodate up to 200 guests.
- Outdoor Spaces: While primarily an indoor venue, the Subscription Rooms opens onto Stroud’s vibrant town square, allowing celebrations to spill into the public space, particularly appealing during the town’s famous farmers’ market days when the square fills with the distinctive energy of this creative Cotswold community.
What Makes Stroud Subscription Rooms Quirky:
- Alternative Cultural Heritage: Unlike traditional wedding venues, the “Sub Rooms” carries the patina of generations of alternative cultural events, from political rallies and suffragette meetings to legendary music performances and community arts gatherings—perfect for couples who value social history and grassroots culture.
- Public-Private Venue Blend: As a community venue in the heart of town, celebrations here have a uniquely visible, semi-public quality, with the option to incorporate the surrounding town environment.
- Creative Stroud Connection: The venue embodies the distinctive creative spirit of Stroud—known as the bohemian capital of the Cotswolds, with its artistic community, environmental activism, and counter-cultural energy providing a ready-made atmosphere that appeals to couples seeking an alternative to conventional Cotswold wedding settings.
Blackfriars Priory
Blackfriars Priory offers one of the most atmospherically unusual wedding settings in Gloucestershire, a 13th-century Dominican priory in the heart of historic Gloucester that combines monastic architecture with an unexpectedly urban location. This scheduled ancient monument creates a celebration space that feels both sacred and otherworldly.
Main Offerings for Weddings:
- Ceremony and Reception Spaces: The North Range provides the priory’s primary space, featuring spectacular vaulted ceilings, massive stone columns, and medieval windows that filter light in a manner designed for spiritual contemplation rather than celebration. This extraordinary space, once used by Dominican friars for worship and study, creates a ceremonial atmosphere unlike typical wedding venues, accommodating up to 150 guests beneath its ancient beams.
- Outdoor Spaces: The venue includes a private walled herb garden, recreated based on medieval monastic planting schemes that prioritised medicinal and culinary herbs rather than decorative flowers.
What Makes Blackfriars Priory Quirky:
- Genuine Religious Architecture Without Religious Restrictions: The priory offers couples the atmospheric grandeur and spiritual resonance of a medieval religious building without the denominational requirements or restrictions of active churches.
- Urban Monastery Contrast: Unlike rural historic venues, Blackfriars creates a startling juxtaposition between its medieval monastic tranquility and its location in Gloucester’s bustling city centre, guests step directly from modern urban streets into a perfectly preserved medieval world, creating a dramatic transition experience.
- Medieval Heritage Packages: Blackfriars offers venue hire starting from £1790. Their flexible approach provides a 12-hour hire period with complete freedom to arrange catering, decoration, and entertainment that complements the medieval setting. Their heritage coordinator can arrange guided historical tours for guests as an unusual addition to the celebration. Current offers include partnering with The Cotswold Caterer to offer the Last Chance to Book Offer, which includes a great all-inclusive package deal for 60 guests for only £9655.00.
Minsterworth Village Hall
Minsterworth Village Hall represents perhaps the ultimate blank-canvas venue for couples seeking to create a completely personalised, community-spirited wedding away from the wedding industry’s conventions. This unassuming rural hall on the banks of the River Severn offers an unexpected freedom rarely found in more commercial settings.
Main Offerings for Weddings:
- Ceremony and Reception Spaces: The main hall provides a refreshingly unpretentious space with its simple wooden floors, adaptable layout, and complete absence of wedding-specific features, a genuine community space that can be transformed according to any vision. This versatile room can accommodate up to 100 seated guests and features large windows overlooking the surrounding countryside.
- Outdoor Spaces: The hall includes access to extensive grounds that lead toward the River Severn, including a large field perfect for additional structures such as tipis or marquees, garden games, or outdoor ceremonies. The proximity to the river adds the unusual dimension of connecting celebrations to this significant waterway and its famous tidal bore.
What Makes Minsterworth Village Hall Quirky:
- Anti-Wedding Industry Appeal: Unlike venues designed specifically for weddings, Minsterworth offers a deliberately unfussy, uncommercial alternative that appeals to couples seeking to escape wedding conventions and create a celebration that feels more like a community gathering than a formal event.
- Riverside Connection: The hall’s proximity to the Severn allows couples to potentially incorporate this mighty river into their celebrations, particularly if timed around the Severn Bore, one of Britain’s most unusual natural phenomena, which could create a truly memorable backdrop unavailable at any other venue.
- DIY Freedom: The hall offers almost unlimited freedom for customisation, from bringing in your own catering at any price point to decorating according to any theme without the restrictions typically imposed by more formal venues, making it perfect for creative couples prioritising individuality over convenience.
Checkout what other quirky venues that the Cotswolds has to offer.
