Celebrity wedding venue popular with Sir Paul McCartney and Liam Gallagher reopens after £60m renovation

It's the wedding venue where Paul McCartney hoped all you need is love and Liam Gallagher showed he wasn’t looking back in anger.

Old Marylebone Town Hall, which has staged more celebrity nuptials than anywhere else in the UK, is set to reopen after a four-year hiatus.

The Grade II listed building will resume hosting marriages, civil partnerships and baby-naming ceremonies in January after a £60 million refurbishment and expansion.

Sir Paul married Linda Eastman at the town hall in 1969 and chose the same venue for his marriage to third wife Nancy Shevell in 2011, while Ringo Starr married second wife Barbara Bach at the venue in 1981.

Gallagher married Patsy Kensit there in 1997 and returned in 2008 to wed Nicole Appleton.

Other weddings at the venue include Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas, Sean Bean and Georgina Sutcliffe, Claudia Winkleman and Kris Thykier, and Cilla Black and Bobby Willis.

Westminster’s chief registrar, Alison Cathcart, who has been in the job for 26 years and presided over Sir Paul’s marriage to Ms Shevell, said more than 200 couples had already enquired about tying the knot at the building.

“We’ve been at Mayfair Library for four years and while that has its charms it is not the same as one of the most famous and popular wedding venues in the country,” she said.

“On a Saturday in the summer we used to do 14 weddings a day, now with bigger rooms and longer opening hours we expect to be doing even more.” The seven new reception rooms are named after different parts of the borough: Westminster, Knightsbridge, Paddington, Marylebone, Soho, Pimlico and Mayfair.

In 2012 Westminster council signed a 35-year lease with London Business School, which has built a new campus on the site and restored the 1920 town hall designed by Sir Edwin Cooper.

The council has spent £800,000 refurbishing the reception rooms, which can be hired from £360 and include wine fridges and drink facilities so guests can stay after the ceremony.

Ms Cathcart admitted to being starstruck at times by the guests but said only two people had ever got special treatment: Prince George and Princess Charlotte.

The registrar went to Kensington Palace to issue their birth certificates rather than getting the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to come to the town hall.

Ms Cathcart said: “I think for the third baby it will only be fair to give someone else the chance to go to the palace.”