Real Wedding: Isobel & Marcus's Intimate Town Hall Wedding, Cambridge

Their Story

Isobel runs a small interiors studio in London — three people, a converted railway arch, the kind of business that survives on careful taste. Marcus is a research scientist at the MRC in Cambridge, work that takes him into the city most weekdays and into long silences most evenings. They met four years ago at a friend's birthday in Spitalfields and have been quietly, deliberately together ever since.

When they began planning, the brief Isobel set herself was two words: tiny and alive. No long top table, no order of service printed in gold, no anxious week-of headcount changes. Eighteen people. People who would actually miss them if they weren't in the room. The Town Hall on Hobson Street offered a chamber that fits forty without looking empty at fourteen, and the rest of the day they built around walking distance — Cambridge being a city you can marry across in good shoes.

The morning began at an Airbnb on Maids Causeway, a narrow Victorian terrace with original tile in the hall and surprisingly good north light in the back bedroom. Isobel got ready with her sister and her mother, hair by Felicity Bridal — soft, low, half-up — and a pastel pink suit rather than a dress, custom-made by a tailor in Soho whose name she would not let me put in writing. Marcus arrived at the Town Hall in a sage-green linen suit and what he called his "very serious tie."

The civil ceremony itself was the smallest, quietest part of the day. Fourteen people in the chamber — parents, siblings, two oldest friends. The registrar, who had clearly done this for two decades, paced the readings beautifully. Isobel's brother gave a surprise speech directly after the vows that nobody had warned anyone about, including, it transpired, himself; he made it through three sentences and one and a half jokes before stopping to compose himself, which is when the whole room stopped composing themselves too.

The remaining four guests joined for the walk from Hobson Street to Peas Hill — confetti in the narrow lane, the kind of moment that would have been impossible in a larger city centre but in Cambridge passes almost unremarked. Lunch was at Midsummer House: eighteen people on one long table, a six-course tasting menu, two and a half hours, no one looking at a phone.

Afterwards, two punts had been booked at Granta Boats. The full party — minus shoes — went out on the Cam in formalwear for an hour. They drifted past King's during evensong, the singing coming faintly across the water, the punters (professionals, mercifully) negotiating around tourists with the patience of people who have negotiated around tourists since 1996. Isobel said afterwards it was the moment the day stopped feeling like a wedding and started feeling like a beginning.

Dinner and drinks were at Hotel du Vin's garden bar, where Carter & Co. — a guitar-and-violin duo — played quietly enough that people could keep talking. By ten the eighteen of them had drifted into a small ring under the fairy lights and were dancing. By midnight Isobel and Marcus were walking back to Maids Causeway with two pairs of shoes between four hands.

It was, Isobel told me by email a fortnight later, "the smallest sensible wedding we could possibly have had, and somehow still the largest day of our lives." Which is, I think, what a wedding at this scale is supposed to do — give the day back to the people in it.