A bride is suing an award-winning wedding venue for £150,000 after she slipped on its hi-tech ‘twinkling dance floor’ and broke her elbow.
Cara Donovan, 35, claims Leez Priory staff failed to stop people taking drinks on to the LED-lit laminated plastic floor, as its maker recommended.
She says tables were placed by the edge of the floor encouraging people to dance and drink after she wed Lee Pierson, and when people spilled booze on the ‘highly slippery’ surface, staff failed to mop it up.
Despite three operations since her fall in September 2018, mum-of-two Mrs Donovan is in permanent pain and unable to go back to work as a special needs teacher.
She is suing Country House Weddings Ltd, which runs the 16th century Tudor manor house, once voted Best UK Wedding Venue by magazine readers.
The dance floor was built in the cellar of the mansion, amid 40 acres of parkland at Great Leighs, near Chelmsford, Essex.
Her barrister Philip Goddard said: ‘During the evening, guests would go on to the dance floor — either to cross it or to dance — holding glasses of drink and occasionally spilling drink.
“The dance floor became wet with patches of spilt drink. Its underfloor lights made it difficult for those on the dance floor to see spilt liquid on the surface.
“At about 10:00 pm, the claimant went to dance. She slipped in the spilt drink, fell and fractured her right, dominant, arm.”
He said the injury hampered her ability to write, drive, use a keyboard or use any two-handed machinery.’
The firm’s defence to the action was not available in court papers, and Mrs Donovan’s claims have not yet been tested in evidence by a judge.