Apostille vs. Embassy legalisation for Latvia
A lot of people assume that because Latvia sits inside the European Union, a UK paper can travel there without any extra certificate. That is no longer true. The EU has a rule that lets member states waive extra certification between each other, but the United Kingdom left the EU and no longer sits inside that rule. Document legalisation for Latvia therefore still runs through the ordinary apostille route, not through some EU shortcut, and skipping that step is the single most common mistake on this corridor.
The good news is that the route itself is short. Latvia is a Hague Convention member, so the only certificate needed is a single stamp added in the UK; there is no separate trip to an embassy and no consular chain layered on top. Once that one seal is in place, a Latvian office treats the paper as settled.
Latvia's Hague status & what it means
Latvia joined the Hague Apostille Convention in 1996, well before it later joined the EU, and that older membership is what actually governs this corridor now that the EU exemption no longer covers UK paperwork. The United Kingdom has issued apostilles of its own since 1965. Both memberships together mean an apostille from United Kingdom to Latvia is accepted on the strength of the Hague treaty alone, independent of anything to do with EU membership on either side.
It helps to keep the two systems apart in your head: EU membership used to offer a shortcut for some public documents moving between member states, while the Hague Convention offers a completely separate, older route open to the UK regardless of its EU status. Since the shortcut no longer applies to UK documents, the Hague route is the one doing all the work for this destination.
The Brighton → Latvia route step by step
For a birth, marriage or death record, the first stop is Brighton & Hove Register Office, where a fresh certified copy can be ordered so the family's own original is never put in the post. That copy becomes the paper that later carries the apostille issued in Brighton for use in Latvia, rather than a document collected years ago and kept in a drawer.
From there the copy travels to the FCDO Legalisation Office, PO Box 6255, Milton Keynes MK10 1XX, the sole body that adds an apostille to a UK-issued paper. Work there happens by post; nobody needs to travel to Milton Keynes in person. Once the seal is fixed, the item is complete and ready to send on to a Latvian recipient.
Cost & timing for this route
The official fee is £45 per item through the standard postal service, or £40 through the express next-day option, which the FCDO reserves for registered businesses rather than individual applicants. What you need for an apostille for Latvia, cost-wise, is simply that fee plus whatever it costs to post the paper both ways.
Standard processing runs up to 25 working days, plus postage on each leg, so the timeline is measured in weeks. Nothing about Latvia's own systems adds to that figure, because the destination side of the process is limited to reading a certificate that already carries everything it needs by the time it lands.
Destination-specific requirements
Apostille for Latvia is the whole of what the destination asks for on the certification side: no embassy stamp, no consular fee and no second signature from a Latvian mission in London. A Latvian office reading the paper accepts the seal as proof that the underlying document is genuine.
Where Latvia may ask for something extra is language: a public office there can request a Latvian translation of an English-language paper, and that request comes from whichever office is reading the file, separate from the apostille step itself. Sending the certified copy and the sealed apostille as one bundle, rather than two separate mailings, keeps everything matched up when it reaches Latvia.