The Richard Curtis links behind Kirstie Allsopp's secret wedding

It is a dramatic and romantic about-turn for a couple who insisted they would never marry. Andersen had only been separated from his ex-wife, Theresa, for five months when she introduced him to Allsopp at a party for a prospective Conservative MP in early 2004, roughly four years after Allsopp started presenting Location, Location, Location.

They fell in love, and Allsopp, who has frequently spoken about her precocious interest in marriage, children and domesticity, was desperately keen to settle down and start a family. She had struggled on the dating scene. “I found my twenties very difficult. I did want to be married and I did want children. That’s what I wanted passionately and thinking about it makes me cry,” Allsopp said in an interview in 2023.

Single in her early thirties, she had even lined up several sperm donors. “It was my whole identity. I didn’t care about having a career. I just worked to pay the mortgage and wanted to find someone with whom to create a home and have children.” One friend had suggested that she would shortcut straight to being a wife – “You’re never going to be a girlfriend,” she said, perhaps because “every time I met a man I would suggest taking him home to my flat to make him shepherd’s pie”, Allsopp said.

Happily, then, she met Andersen when she was 32. But he insisted he wouldn’t remarry. “He sat me down 10 days after we met and said, ‘I never want to be married again but I’d like to have children with you and live with you for the rest of my life,’” Allsopp once said.