By Georgina Clatworthy

Your wedding reception will be one of the biggest parties you will ever organize and one of the trickiest tasks you will need to complete will be organizing the seating plan.  You may be thinking ‘why do I need a seating plan?’ well, without one, your guests will simply all file into the reception room and mill around wondering where to sit and who with.

A seating plan will give you greater control over who sits were and with whom so as to avoid any potential conflicts between people who do not get on and also with the aim of creating a happy wedding atmosphere by sitting people together who you are sure do or will get on.  Giving your guests some guidance on where to sit will also speed things up and you will get everyone seated and ready eat in no time at all.

Seating plans are particularly important for a large formal wedding and even if you are not having a sit down meal, you may still have tables set out so a seating plan is still a useful tool for a buffet style reception.  If your wedding is small and intimate then you may find that a seating plan is not necessary and in that case it can be wise to intimate to your guests that it is a ’sit anywhere’ event.

Traditionally, the reception venue will be laid out with a long table at one end of the room, known as the top table, with several smaller square or round tables laid out to one side of the top table.  The aim with the arrangement of the smaller tables is for your guests to be able to see the bride and groom from wherever they are sitting.  Now of course, some of your guests will have their backs to you but make sure there is sufficient space between the tables so they can turn their chairs to you when the speeches and toasts commence.

The tables nearest to the top table are traditionally reserved for the families of the bride and groom and all other guests are then fitted on the remaining tables.  The top table will consist of you and your husband in the center, your mother and father on either side, the groom’s father and mother to one end and the best man and chief bridesmaid to the other end.  There are many variations of the top table, particularly to accommodate parents who are divorced and remarried.  The one constant is that you should both sit in the center and you can organize everyone else in a way that works best for you.

When working out who will sit where it is a good idea to write the names of each guest on pieces of card, followed by a larger card with the table numbers on.  You can then arrange each guest around a table in a configuration which works well for you.  There are some considerations though:

• Try to sit people of the same age together
• Avoid placing singles on tables of couples, try to put at least two single people together on a table but avoid any matchmaking!
• Keep couples and those with children together
• Try to sit people together whom you think will get on together well

You aim is to try to achieve lively tables where everyone can engage with each other in a friendly and cheerful manner.  Once you have worked out where everyone will sit you can go ahead and have a seating plan board made to display at the entrance to the reception room.