Wedding Photographer Bury St Edmunds — Abbey Ruins, the Cathedral Town and West Suffolk
Bury St Edmunds is the most architecturally distinguished town in West Suffolk — a planned Norman grid town founded in the eleventh century around the great Benedictine abbey of St Edmund, whose ruins, cathedral close, Regency streets and Georgian market square together constitute one of the finest small historic town centres in England. The Abbey Gardens — the public park laid within the grounds of the dissolved royal abbey, whose Norman gate tower and the ruins of the east end of the vast abbey church provide some of the most dramatic Gothic masonry fragments in East Anglia — provide a portrait setting of immense historical resonance for Bury St Edmunds wedding photography: the flint and limestone Norman fabric of the ruined walls, the abbey’s great gate and the parkland landscaping of the nineteenth century create a completely unique portrait environment.
The Cathedral, the Abbey Gate and the Norman Market Town
The Cathedral of St Edmundsbury — the former parish church of St James, elevated to cathedral status in 1914 and extended with a new crossing tower and lantern completed in 2005 — provides a working cathedral of intimate proportions whose perpendicular nave, the new tower’s stone and the west front facing the Norman market square provide both ceremony and portrait settings of considerable ecclesiastical distinction. The Norman gate tower of the abbey — the enormous twelfth-century western entrance to the monastic precinct, now serving as the entrance to the Abbey Gardens — provides one of the most formidable pieces of Romanesque ecclesiastical architecture surviving in Suffolk and frames any couple portrait taken beneath its arch in a historical setting of extreme depth. Abbeygate Street and the Georgian Angel Hill — one of England’s finest Georgian market spaces, with the Angel Hotel where Dickens is believed to have written the Pickwick Papers — provide town-centre portrait settings of considerable elegance.
Lavenham, Long Melford and the West Suffolk Villages
The West Suffolk countryside surrounding Bury St Edmunds contains the most concentrated collection of medieval wool-trade villages in England: Lavenham — fourteen miles south-east, with its perfectly preserved half-timbered market place, the Guildhall and the Perpendicular church of St Peter and St Paul — is one of the most photographically remarkable medieval market towns in Europe. Long Melford’s three-mile village green, flanked by Perpendicular church, Melford Hall (National Trust Tudor manor) and Kentwell Hall (redbrick moated manor) at its north end provide an exceptional landscape of medieval and Tudor monument. These West Suffolk villages and market towns are all within thirty minutes of Bury St Edmunds and extend any portrait session’s range to encompass the best of Suffolk’s medieval built heritage.