Middleton wore a white dress by British designer Sarah Burton, as well as a tiara lent to her by the Queen. Prince William wore the uniform of his honorary rank of Colonel of the Irish Guards. William's best man was his brother, Prince Harry, while the bride's sister, Pippa, acted as her maid of honour. The wedding ceremony began at 11:00 am. John Robert Hall, the Dean of Westminster, conducted the service, with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, conducting the marriage ceremony itself and Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, giving the sermon. A reading was given by the bride's brother, James. After the ceremony, the newly married couple travelled in procession to Buckingham Palace for the traditional appearance on the balcony and a flypast before crowds assembled in The Mall. Later the Prince drove his Duchess the short distance to Clarence House in his father's classic Aston Martin DB6 Volante, decorated by Prince Harry with a number plate “JU5T WED”. Following the wedding, the couple intend to continue living on Anglesey in North Wales, where Prince William is based as an RAF Search and Rescue pilot.
Over 5000 street parties were held to mark the Royal wedding throughout the United Kingdom and one million people lined the route between Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace. In the United Kingdom TV audiences peaked at 26.3 million viewers with a total of 36.7 million watching part of the coverage. The ceremony was viewed live by tens of millions more around the world including 72 million on the YouTube Royal Channel
The cost of the wedding was reportedly £20 million. The Australian newspaper Herald Sun estimated A$32 million esd for security and A$800,000 for flowers. Credible estimates of the cost of the special public holiday allowed for the wedding vary between £1.2 billion and £2.9 billion. The Government tourist authority VisitBritain predicts the wedding will trigger a tourism boom that will last several years, eventually pulling in an additional 4 million visitors, generating £2 billion for UK tourism. However, VisitBritain’s head of research and forecasting, David Edwards, suggested to colleagues two days after the engagement was announced that the evidence points to royal weddings having a negative impact on inbound tourism. He noted that the number of visitors to Britain was down significantly in July 1981 from the same period in other years, when Charles and Diana were married, and also July 1986 was down from July 1985 when Andrew and Sarah were married.
An April 2011 poll of 2,000 British adults found that 35% of the public intended to watch the wedding on television while an equal proportion planned to ignore the event altogether. According to their reported plans, women were more than twice as likely (47%) to watch the event as men (23%). Early estimates following the ceremony indicated an estimated 24.5 million people in the United Kingdom watched the wedding on either BBC One or ITV1, giving those channels a 99.4% share of the terrestrial television audience as the service began, with the BBC’s Live royal wedding website having 9 million hits, estimating over half the British population watched the wedding.
There were about 5,500 applications to hold royal wedding street parties across England and Wales, including 850 in London, one of which was hosted by Prime Minister David Cameron in Downing Street for charity workers and local children. The anti-monarchy campaign group Republic held an alternative street party in Holborn. The event had initially been blocked by Camden Council after businesses raised concerns about loss of trade.
A number of ceremonies and parties were held at places which had an intimate connection with the couple. In Scotland, about 2,000 people attended a party at the University of St Andrews, where the royal couple first met. Hundreds of people watched the ceremony on a big screen in Edinburg’s Festival Square. Welsh celebrations were led by Anglesey, where Prince William is a search and rescue pilot and where the couple will reside after the wedding. 2,600 people gathered to watch the event on big screens there, and around 200 street parties were organized throughout the rest of the country, including over 50 in Cardiff.
