Wedding Photographer
Anglesey Abbey

Anglesey Abbey is one of the most beautiful and unusual garden settings for wedding photography in the east of England. The estate began as an Augustinian priory in the twelfth century; the present house dates from about 1600 and was transformed from a modest Jacobean manor into one of England's most ambitious twentieth-century garden-making projects by Huttleston Broughton, 1st Baron Fairhaven. Between 1926 and 1966, Lord Fairhaven transformed 114 acres of flat Cambridgeshire fenland into a garden of formal avenues, sweeping lawns, classical sculpture, and an internationally famous winter garden — now in the care of the National Trust.

For wedding photography, Anglesey Abbey offers a range of settings that few English gardens can match. The long lime and chestnut avenues provide a formal grandeur — reminiscent of French château gardens — that works perfectly for ceremony processions and formal group photographs. The classical sculpture placed throughout the garden gives a series of intimate backdrop settings. The winter garden — with its hundreds of named snowdrop cultivars, its silver birch bark, and its extraordinary quiet — is one of the most unusual and beautiful settings for winter wedding portraits in England.

Lode Mill — a working eighteenth-century watermill at the eastern edge of the garden, with its millrace and leat running beneath the willows — gives Anglesey Abbey a pastoral, working landscape dimension that purely ornamental gardens lack. The contrast between the mill's functional brick and weatherboard and the formal garden beyond makes a particularly good photographic pairing in autumn light.