Wedding Photographer Canterbury — the Cathedral City, Christ Church Gate and the Medieval Walled Town
Canterbury is England’s most important pilgrimage city — the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the destination of Chaucer’s pilgrims, whose medieval walled city contains the Cathedral and World Heritage Site of Christ Church, the oldest continuously functioning cathedral in England, in continuous use as a place of Christian worship since 597 AD when St Augustine arrived from Rome to convert the kingdom of Kent. For Canterbury wedding photography, the Cathedral Close’s Norman and Perpendicular architecture, the medieval city walls with their towers, the timber-frame weavers’ houses above the River Stour and the ancient lanes of the Buttermarket provide a concentrated medieval urban portrait environment of extraordinary historical depth that is unique among English cities outside York and Chester.
Canterbury Cathedral, Christ Church Gate and the Cathedral Close
Canterbury Cathedral’s exterior — the Bell Harry Tower (the central tower of 1498, the tallest in the Cathedral), the Perpendicular nave and the Norman crypt below — provides a sequence of exterior portrait settings of medieval English ecclesiastical architecture of the very highest quality: the Christ Church Gate (the ornamental gatehouse of 1517 with the Tudor heraldic carvings intact) frames the approach to the Cathedral precinct and provides one of the finest ceremonial architectural portrait foregrounds available in any English cathedral city. The Cathedral Close’s mixture of Norman, Perpendicular and later domestic buildings provides a complex portrait landscape whose variety is high within a relatively compact area. The martyrdom transept, where Becket was murdered in 1170, provides the most historically charged interior portrait setting in English Christianity.
The Weavers, the Stour and the Medieval Streetscape
The Weavers’ houses on the River Stour — the timber-frame buildings overhanging the medieval channel that runs through the city centre, built originally by Flemish weavers who settled in Canterbury after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 — provide portrait settings of intimate medieval domestic character with the river reflections below. The Westgate towers — the medieval gatehouse of 1380, the largest surviving medieval city gate in England — provide portrait settings of dramatic medieval military architecture at the city’s northern entrance. The city’s medieval lanes — Mercery Lane, Butchery Lane and the Burgate area — provide street-portrait settings of dense medieval-plot character with overhanging jetties and the Cathedral towers visible above the roofline throughout.