Marrying in a library, twelve days before Christmas.
The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh was founded by royal charter in 1681, and since 1846 it has been at home on Queen Street, in a hall designed by Thomas Hamilton, across the road from Queen Street Gardens. It opens its rooms for weddings too. I married a couple in its New Library in December 2025: one o'clock, a Christmas tree in the corner and books on every wall.
The New Library
The College offers three main rooms for weddings, and the New Library is the one I know. It is lined with antique bookcases and alcoves, with balconies looking down from above and, as the College puts it, a grand marble fireplace at either end. The shape does half your planning: it's long and straight, so the aisle more or less makes itself, and the College quotes up to 100 for a ceremony. For my couple it was set with rows of wooden chairs under a lit chandelier, and they stood at one of the fireplaces with the books all around them.
A room like that sets the tone before anyone says a word. It's grand without being stiff, and in December, with the lamps on and the tree lit, it felt properly festive without anybody having to try.
The Great Hall and the rest
The Great Hall is the big room, with pillars and an ornate ceiling; Tie the Knot Scotland reports it takes ceremonies and dinners of up to 150. The Cullen Suite looks out over Queen Street Gardens and across to the Firth of Forth. I haven't married anyone in either yet, so go and stand in them before you decide, and ask the College how the rooms work together across the day: where you marry, where you eat, and where your guests wait in between. The College also offers elopements and micro-weddings, if it's the library you want and not the crowd.
A winter wedding on Queen Street
We had a piper playing outside on Queen Street as the guests arrived, and there's no better welcome on a December street. Inside, the ceremony had a reading and a quaich, and, it being December, the whole room singing one song together, which I'd recommend to anyone brave enough.
In mid-December the light is going before four, so a one o'clock start was a smart call. The College has keys to Queen Street Gardens, and Tie the Knot Scotland says a wedding here includes two hours in them for photographs: take them early, while there's still daylight. If you're weighing up the season, here's the case for a winter wedding in Scotland.
The legal bit, handled
A humanist wedding in Scotland is legally binding, and as a Humanist Society Scotland celebrant I look after every legal word of it: the declarations, the schedule, the witnesses. I write every ceremony from scratch, so the story told in that room is yours and nobody else's. I'm a humanist wedding celebrant covering Edinburgh from my base in Glasgow, and my Edinburgh wedding celebrant page has more on the city.
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More Edinburgh & Fife venues I know inside out: Riddles Court · Kimpton Charlotte Square · Fingal, Leith · The Den at Culross · West Lothian Burgh Halls