Wedding Photographer Cambridgeshire — University City, the Fens and the Villages of the Cam Valley
Cambridgeshire is a county of three entirely distinct landscapes that together provide the most geographically varied wedding photography setting in East Anglia: the university city of Cambridge at the county’s southern axis, concentrating eight hundred years of collegiate architecture within a single mile of the River Cam; the flat black-soil Fenland north of Ely, whose enormous skies and cathedral-on-a-hill silhouette define the English Fenland image; and the chalk river valleys of the Cam, Rhee and Granta in the county’s south-west, with their stream-side water meadows, thatched stone villages and ancient church towers. For Cambridgeshire wedding photography, I cover the complete county and advise on portrait locations across all three landscape zones based on your specific venue.
Cambridge, the Backs and the Collegiate Architecture
The Cambridge Backs — the riverside meadows and gardens behind Trinity, Clare, King’s, Queen’s and St John’s colleges, accessible from Garret Hostel Lane and the Silver Street Bridge — provide the most celebrated urban river portrait setting in England: the Clare Bridge (Cambridge’s oldest surviving bridge, 1638), the Wren Library reflecting in the Cam, King’s College Chapel’s Perpendicular towers above the riverside willows and the Mathematical Bridge’s timber geometry are all accessible along a single hour’s portrait walk from any Cambridge city venue. The university’s college courts — the great Renaissance court of Trinity, the intimate medieval court of Corpus Christi and the Baroque court of Clare with its stone urns — provide enclosed architectural portrait settings of extraordinary quality.
Ely Cathedral, Grantchester and the Cambridgeshire Villages
Ely Cathedral — the most dramatically sited cathedral building in England, rising from the flat Fenland at 66 metres to dominate the Fenland landscape for twenty miles — provides both ceremony and exterior portrait settings of European Gothic cathedral majesty above the Fenland plain. Grantchester village, two miles from Cambridge along the Cam towpath, provides the archetypally English river meadow portrait setting: the ancient church of St Andrew and St Mary, the Orchard Tea Garden where Rupert Brooke wrote, the wooden footbridge over the Granta and the willows trailing in the slow water are all within a ten-minute punt or walk from Grantchester. The villages of Barrington, Haslingfield, Comberton and the Gog Magog Hills above Cherry Hinton provide high-quality rural Cambridgeshire portrait settings within fifteen minutes of Cambridge for any couple wanting countryside portraits alongside the university city’s architecture.