Wedding Photographer Bedford — the Embankment, the Great Ouse and Bedfordshire
Bedford is the county town of Bedfordshire — a market town on the Great Ouse whose Victorian riverside development created one of the finest urban embankment promenade landscapes in England’s inland towns: the Embankment gardens, the Victorian Swiss Garden boathouse at the river’s edge, the old bridge and the sequence of Victorian civic buildings above the river bank provide a portrait landscape of considerable quality for a market town of Bedford’s modest scale. Bedford is also the birthplace of John Bunyan and the town’s connections to the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress are reflected in the Bunyan Museum, the Meeting Place and the various memorials to the tinker-preacher throughout the town centre. For Bedford wedding photography, the town’s combination of Victorian riverside beauty and the broader Bedfordshire countryside of the Ouse and Nene valleys provides a complete wedding day setting.
The Embankment, the Newnham Bridge and the Ouse Valley
The Great Ouse Embankment in Bedford — laid out by John William James in the 1880s as a formal riverside promenade with specimen trees, Victorian ironwork bandstand and boathouses — is one of the finest Victorian civic riverside landscapes in the Midlands and provides portrait settings of formal Victorian character immediately available from almost any town centre venue. The Suspension Bridge (1888) and the Victorian iron footbridge provide foreground architectural elements of strong geometric character for riverside portrait photography. Priory Country Park to the east of the town provides a large, semi-natural lakeland landscape of gravel pit restoration with reed beds, wildfowl and open water that provides a more naturalistic portrait environment.
Woburn Abbey, Wrest Park and the Bedfordshire Countryside
Woburn Abbey — the ducal seat of the Russell family, set in the 3,000-acre Park with its safari park, sculpture garden and the Palladian south front overlooking the formal garden — is eleven miles west of Bedford and provides country house portrait settings of the highest English aristocratic quality within easy drive of any Bedford venue. Wrest Park, near Silsoe (managed by English Heritage), contains the most elaborate formal garden layout in Bedfordshire: the formal canals, the Archer Pavilion, the Louis XV-inspired French Garden and the orangery provide a formal English landscape garden portrait sequence of extraordinary completeness. The Chiltern Hills begin at Dunstable fifteen miles south and provide chalk escarpment and ancient beechwood portraits at the county’s southern edge.