Apostille vs. Embassy legalisation for Georgia
Two different processes exist for making a foreign paper count abroad, and only one of them applies here. Embassy legalisation is a chain: a home authority signs off, then the destination's mission adds its own stamp on top. A single certificate replaces that whole chain for any country that joined the Hague Convention. Issued once, it travels with the paper and needs no second signature from anyone else.
Georgia sits on that list, so a paper heading there follows the shorter route rather than the longer one. The FCDO Legalisation Office issues the certificate for a fee of £45 per document by standard post, or £40 per document on the next-day service open to registered businesses. Nothing further has to happen on the UK side once that certificate sits on the paper — no mission to visit, no second queue.
Georgia's Hague status & what it means
Georgia joined the Hague Convention in 2007, and that date is the reason the shorter route exists at all for this destination. Before then, a paper travelling from the UK toward Georgia would have needed the longer embassy chain described above; since that year, one certificate has done the whole job on the UK side.
This matters for planning because it removes an entire stage from the process. There is no Georgian mission to schedule a visit around and no separate consular charge to budget on top of the apostille itself — the certificate from the FCDO Legalisation Office marks the end of the UK part of the journey, leaving only delivery and, where it applies, local translation on the Georgian side.
The London → Georgia route step by step
Someone in London preparing a paper for Georgia starts the same way anyone in the country does: gather the original or a certified copy, then post it onward rather than hunting for a local counter, because none exists for this service. Living in London changes where a fresh certified copy comes from, not how the certificate itself gets issued.
Westminster Register Office, 317 Harrow Road, London W9 3RJ, is the local point for civil records — birth, marriage and death certificates — used by residents who need an apostille issued in London for use in Georgia. A university transcript, a company filing or a power of attorney takes the same national route north to Milton Keynes once a certified original is in hand; the city only changes the first stop, never the last one.
Cost & timing for this route
The standard turnaround runs up to 25 working days plus postage, and that figure covers the certificate stage itself, not the days a document spends travelling to and from Milton Keynes in the post. A registered business can use the next-day service instead, at £40 per document, which is genuinely quicker because it sits on a different queue, not a discount on the same one.
Plan the whole document legalisation for Georgia around the mail time as much as the desk time. A parcel posted on a Friday loses two days before it even reaches the sorting stage, and the same delay applies again on the way home, so a deadline should account for both legs rather than the stated turnaround alone.
Destination-specific requirements
An apostille from United Kingdom to Georgia is the correct and sufficient certification on its own — a Georgian body that asks for a legalised UK paper is asking for exactly this certificate, nothing more from a UK authority. Whether the receiving office in Georgia additionally wants a Georgian translation of the text is a separate matter the certificate does not settle, since that call sits with the receiving side, not with the office that adds the stamp.
Keep the certificate fixed to the paper exactly as it arrives; a clerk in Georgia checks the apostille against the sheet it is attached to, so separating the two, or copying only one of them, undoes the point of having it done in the first place. A company registering a UK-issued power of attorney, for instance, should present both pages together at every counter along the way.