Most of the weddings we play are country houses and barns out in the Vale or up the valleys. The Parkgate is the opposite, and that is the appeal: a city-centre wedding in the grand old Cardiff Post Office, with your guests staying upstairs or in the hotels a two-minute walk away rather than booking taxis back out into the dark. Everything happens in one building in the middle of the city, and that changes the feel of the whole day.
Cardiff’s old Post Office, on Westgate Street
The Parkgate is a four-star hotel in the city’s grand former General Post Office - opened in 1897 for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, reborn as a hotel in 2021, and part of The Celtic Collection. Weddings run in the Postmaster Suite, the building’s headline room, which seats up to 344 for a wedding breakfast, has its own private bar and divides down for smaller days. It sits right on Westgate Street against the Principality Stadium, a few minutes from Cardiff Central, with bedrooms on site and several more hotels within walking distance - which for a city wedding is the thing that makes the logistics easy. The same room hosts corporate dinners and awards nights, and we play those here too.
Music for the whole day, not just the evening
The advantage of a single hotel is that we can soundtrack the lot. A solo pianist, a duo or an acoustic trio in the bar or one of the smaller rooms for the ceremony or the drinks reception, then the full band in the Postmaster Suite for the evening - the music follows the day through the building rather than appearing for the first dance and vanishing. We play the Postmaster Suite as a 5 to 8-piece, usually keys-led, which suits a refined hotel ballroom better than an overpowering wall of backline. Our wedding shape is a chilled first set of around half an hour - first dance, any father-daughter dance, a cocktail-hour feel - then two 50-minute dancefloor sets blended together in our own style, with DJ playlists covering the gaps.
The practical bits worth knowing
A few things only land once you have played the room. The get-in is honest about the building’s age: we load through the rear courtyard, in past one of the smaller bars and into the side of the Postmaster Suite, with limited vehicle access at the rear and tight city-centre parking that is best arranged ahead. There is no house PA, so the sound and lighting come in - either our own rig, the kind we run for a larger wedding, or your production company’s. And while there is no sound limiter, there are bedrooms directly above the suite, so the levels want managing through the night; we keep the low end in check so the floor stays loud where it counts without anyone upstairs picking up the phone. None of it is a problem - it is just the difference between a band that has played here and one finding out on the day.
The Brotherhood are South Wales’ premier wedding band, playing weddings across Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan. Check our availability for your date at The Parkgate Hotel.
