Two marks, two audiences
British paper leaves the country under one of two arrangements. The apostille is a single certificate that participating countries agree in advance to read on sight, with no further checking at the far end. Consular legalisation is a chain: the same British certificate goes on first, and a desk acting for the destination country adds its own mark on top. Which arrangement applies is settled by the destination, never by the sender.
That settlement is the only thing separating a short errand from a longer one, and nothing about the document itself moves it between the two. A company letter and a birth record from the same street in Belfast follow whichever road their destination keeps. The wording, the age and the condition of the sheet change nothing about which road that is.
Where Togo stands
Togo has not joined the Hague Apostille Convention. Because of that, papers heading there take the chained road, and document legalisation for Togo is the phrase that describes the finished job. The British certificate is still issued and still matters; it is simply not the last mark, and on its own it does not put the paper in a state an office in Togo can act on.
It is worth being plain about what this is not. It is not a judgement on the document, on the person named in it, or on the office that produced it. An apostille for Togo would be a real certificate carrying a real authority's word. Recognition is an agreement between states about which marks they will read on sight, and Togo has not entered that agreement.
The Belfast end, and the desks after it
The first question is which sheet travels. Where the paper is a Northern Ireland civil record, the General Register Office for Northern Ireland (GRONI) at Colby House, Stranmillis Court, Belfast BT9 5RR issues certified copies of birth, marriage and death entries. A fresh certified copy can carry the marks, so the certificate you already hold stays with you and never joins the chain.
From there the sheet reaches the FCDO Legalisation Office, PO Box 6255, Milton Keynes MK10 1XX. That office works by post, so the whole British stage happens through the mail rather than over a counter. An apostille from United Kingdom to Togo is the opening of the file rather than the end of it, and the consular desk adds the closing mark once the British certificate is attached.
What carries a price, and what carries a wait
One figure here is published and fixed: £45 per document on the standard postal route, or £40 per document next-day where the sender is a registered business. The unit is the document, so two sheets in one envelope are charged twice. Counting the sheets that genuinely have to travel is therefore part of the budget rather than an afterthought.
Timing carries no published figure, and this page will not invent one. What can be said is that money and time are counted differently on this route. The charge follows each sheet, while the wait follows each desk. A file of four certificates costs four times over, but it does not sit in four separate queues on that account.
Recognition is the whole test
Everything on this corridor reduces to one question: will the office receiving the paper read the mark on it? For a lone British certificate travelling to Togo the answer is no, and no amount of supporting paper argues a document into recognition. There is no apostille issued in Belfast for use in Togo that alters that position on its own, however carefully the file is assembled.
The practical planning is short as a result. Name the destination at the outset, because the route is chosen by it and no later step revisits that choice. Keep a scan of every page as it reads now. Treat the British certificate as the opening of the file, since for this destination the closing mark is applied somewhere else entirely.