Famous old York pub goes into the wedding business

One of York’s best known pubs is expanding into the wedding business by offering a venue for smaller scale ceremonies.

Marc Allinson, who runs the Artful Dodger on Micklegate, says it’s the best way to make the most of the upstairs function room and after the covid restrictions are relaxed he expects to see a big demand for more compact locations.

Marc told YorkMix: “We had just opened it up before the pandemic started and we were looking at all sorts of different ideas to make use of what is a very classy looking room. It’s entirely different in style and theme to the downstairs.

“We were looking at what was going on with the wedding industry, and realised that a lot of weddings these days are going to have to be smaller.

“There’s going to be a big backlog of people who haven’t been able to get married over the last year.

“So we thought, we’ve got a room there that’s capable of doing weddings for about 40 people ideally. But because of the size of the room, if we have weddings of 15 people it’s not going to look like you’re in a massive room.”

Venue with everything

Marc says the venue has got a bit of everything, the bar, the nice scenery of the city and the location. He thinks it will be great for people who just want to get married now rather than wait for a time when you can hold huge celebrations again.

He said it “wasn’t overly difficult” to make the changes. “We had the room ready, we only had to make a couple of modifications. We needed a licence and had to make sure the city council was happy with everything.”

The licence has been granted but it won’t start until May so that will give him a chance to sort out things like new flooring and seating.

It will be a great help to the Artful Dodger business plan as the venue doesn’t have a big outside space so will have to remain closed till restrictions ease again – hopefully next month .