An Edinburgh Old Town library wedding in December

Candles, black tie, mulled wine on arrival — a proper Old Town celebration.

There are few rooms in Scotland that do the work of a wedding venue quite like the historic Old Town library's Upper Reading Room, with its double-height colonnades and gilded ceiling, and Morag and David knew within five minutes of viewing it that nowhere else in Edinburgh's Old Town would come close.

Married on the second Saturday of December, in full black tie, with candles as the only light source for much of the evening, their wedding leaned hard into the building's own grandeur rather than trying to compete with it.

Choosing a room this big for 90 guests

At 90 guests, the couple were well under the historic Old Town library's ceremony capacity, and rather than fill the extra space with more décor, they let it breathe — long tables running the length of the room, tall candelabra spaced generously apart, and almost no additional florals beyond eucalyptus garlands and a scattering of white roses.

Venue hire for the historic Old Town library for an evening wedding of this scale runs from roughly £7,500 to £11,000 depending on the season and rooms booked, a significant outlay that the couple say was worth every penny for a building with that much genuine history.

Arrival and the mulled wine welcome

Guests arrived from a chilly Parliament Square into a warmly lit colonnade, handed mulled wine and shortbread within seconds of stepping through the door, a deliberate contrast the couple built the whole evening around. 'We wanted people to feel the cold outside, then feel that heat and light hit them,' says David.

The ceremony itself was conducted by a humanist celebrant, legally recognised in Scotland since 2005, which gave the couple full freedom to write their own vows and structure the ceremony around readings from David's grandfather's old poetry collection rather than a fixed religious script.

A properly Scottish evening

Dinner ran to four courses, finishing with a cranachan trifle, and the top table was piped in by a lone piper from the gallery above, the sound rolling down over the room in a way that several guests later described as the moment that made the whole evening feel unmistakably Scottish.

Highland dress was worn by roughly half the male guests, kilts in a mix of family and hired tartans, and the evening's ceilidh — held in an adjoining hall rather than the reading room itself, to protect the antique furnishings — ran until 1am with a full eight-piece band.

Practical notes for a historic Old Town library wedding

For a couple who met at university in Edinburgh and never really left, marrying in one of the city's most storied rooms felt less like a splurge and more like a homecoming. As Morag puts it: 'This is our city. We wanted a room that felt like it had been waiting for us.'

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