Ashford, Maidstone and Sevenoaks top Kent's map of places to marry

Couples looking for a wedding venue in Kent have the most to choose from in Ashford, Maidstone and Sevenoaks, which have 25 places licensed for civil weddings and civil partnerships each, according to The Wedding Venue List (weddingvenuelist.co.uk/venues-in/kent), a free map of every licensed venue in England and Wales. At the other end of the table, Dartford has four.

Across Kent and Medway there are 228 licensed venues, more than in any other county in the South East. Hampshire, the next, has 206. For a county of nearly two million people that works out at about 12 venues for every 100,000 residents, close to the average for England.

District by district, the count runs:

Ashford 25
Maidstone 25
Sevenoaks 25
Dover 24
Swale 21
Canterbury 20
Folkestone and Hythe 17
Medway 17
Thanet 16
Tunbridge Wells 15
Tonbridge and Malling 10
Gravesham 8
Dartford 4

Sevenoaks: the most choice for its size

Sevenoaks has about 123,000 residents, so its 25 venues give couples there 20 for every 100,000 people, the highest figure in Kent. Among them is Hever Castle, the double-moated childhood home of Anne Boleyn. Ceremonies are held in the castle's panelled Inner Hall for up to 60 guests, or, from April to October, under the Italian Loggia, looking out over the 38-acre lake that William Waldorf Astor created when he set about restoring the castle in 1903.

Ashford: a ceremony inside a windmill

Ashford's 25 include five barns and a golf club, and one of the more unusual ceremony rooms in the county. At Willesborough Windmill, a white smock mill built in 1869 and now Grade II* listed, couples marry on the ground floor of the mill itself, then climb to the gallery that runs around the third floor for photographs across the courtyard and towards the Wye Downs. Ashford Borough Council restored the mill in 1991, and the volunteers who run it still grind flour there, though never on a Sunday. Millers held that to be unlucky.

Dartford: four venues and a royal gatehouse

Dartford sits right beside Sevenoaks and has much the same number of residents, about 126,000. It has four licensed venues, which is three for every 100,000 people and the fewest for its population of any council area in the South East.

One of the four has a long history. The Manor Gatehouse on Priory Road is all that remains of the manor house Henry VIII made out of Dartford Priory in the early 1540s, and Anne of Cleves, his fourth wife, lived there in the last years of her life. Today couples marry in its Manor Room, which takes 35 guests.

Medway, home to more people than any other part of the county at nearly 293,000, has 17 venues. That is fewer for its size than anywhere in Kent except Dartford.

For a Dartford couple, the neighbours widen the choice quickly. Sevenoaks and Gravesham, which both share a border with the borough, hold 33 licensed venues between them.