The Richard Curtis links behind Kirstie Allsopp’s secret wedding
Over the course of her 21-year relationship with property developer Ben Andersen, Kirstie Allsopp maintained she was “happily unmarried”.
“I have no problem being a middle-aged girlfriend with an even older middle-aged boyfriend,” she once said. “I have learnt from the very best, as we live next door to the most famous happily unmarried couple — Richard Curtis and Emma Freud. Richard even jokes that he had to make the film Four Weddings and a Funeral to explain to his mother why he has never married.”
However, like Freud and Curtis, who married in secret in 2023 after 33 years together, it seems Allsopp, 53, has had a change of heart – and the Curtis references don’t end there.
This week, in the Grosvenor Chapel in Mayfair, the church featured in Curtis’s film Love Actually, Andersen and Allsopp made their vows.
This is no coincidence: “I am a huge Richard Curtis fan and have an original script from the movie,” Allsopp said. The chapel was also the venue for the memorial service to her father Charles, the 6th Baron Hindlip, who died last year aged 83.
The ceremony was soundtracked by I Vow to Thee, My Country and the Beatles’ All You Need is Love – another nod to Curtis’s most famous film.
Again, like Curtis and Freud, the details of the ceremony were kept tightly under wraps. The 70 family and friends who attended thought it was Andersen’s 64th birthday party and were only told it was a wedding at the very last minute. (The arrangements were so last-minute, in fact, that some guests – including her Channel 4 co-presenter Phil Spencer – were unable to make it.)
It is a dramatic and romantic about-turn for a couple who insisted they would never marry. Andersen had only been separated from his ex-wife, Theresa, for five months when she introduced him to Allsopp at a party for a prospective Conservative MP in early 2004, roughly four years after Allsopp started presenting Location, Location, Location.
They fell in love, and Allsopp, who has frequently spoken about her precocious interest in marriage, children and domesticity, was desperately keen to settle down and start a family. She had struggled on the dating scene. “I found my twenties very difficult. I did want to be married and I did want children. That’s what I wanted passionately and thinking about it makes me cry,” Allsopp said in an interview in 2023.
Single in her early thirties, she had even lined up several sperm donors. “It was my whole identity. I didn’t care about having a career. I just worked to pay the mortgage and wanted to find someone with whom to create a home and have children.” One friend had suggested that she would shortcut straight to being a wife – “You’re never going to be a girlfriend,” she said, perhaps because “every time I met a man I would suggest taking him home to my flat to make him shepherd’s pie”, Allsopp said.
Happily, then, she met Andersen when she was 32. But he insisted he wouldn’t remarry. “He sat me down 10 days after we met and said, ‘I never want to be married again but I’d like to have children with you and live with you for the rest of my life,’” Allsopp once said.
She took this as “almost like a proposal” and decided to park marriage in favour of cohabitation, children and domestic bliss, and their life together since has been very happy indeed.
“I have a blissfully happy life with a kind, intelligent man who has exactly the same interests as me, and I’m covered in jewellery I didn’t buy for myself – not that that’s the be-all and end-all…,” she said in a Telegraph interview in 2012, when her children were small. Andersen already had two sons from his previous marriage, Hal and Orion, and together they had two more: Bay, now aged 18, and Oscar, 16. “I was lucky with Ben that he absolutely wanted more children immediately and he was very committed to that,” she said.
In interviews over the years, as well as gaining a reputation as an outspoken domestic truth-teller – she once said washing machines in kitchens are “disgusting” and that, if you want something out of a man, you should ask him on a full stomach – she has maintained her position.
By 2020, however, her stance had softened slightly. “I don’t want the attention of being a bride,” she said. “I’m not a fan of the staggering, never-ending self-absorption of ‘my big day’.” However, she added that: “One day we may get married, but if we do, it will be a low-key affair. We will do it in London, where the majority of our friends live or work, last thing on a Thursday, then we’ll all go to a local restaurant where supper will be on us.”
In the end, that is exactly what they did. The bride wore Oscar de la Renta; in similarly low-key fashion, the dress was bought two weeks before the ceremony in the sales. The groom wore a navy suit.
A low-key wedding, on a Thursday, with their two sons and Allsopp’s two stepsons as ushers – and a happy ever after worthy of a Richard Curtis rom-com.