Wedding Photographer Chipping Campden — the Wool Town, the Market Hall and the Cotswold Escarpment
Chipping Campden is the finest of the Cotswold wool towns — a single main street of seventeenth-century honey-limestone merchants’ houses, wool staplers’ halls and the great church of St James ascending the slope of the Cotswold escarpment in a composition that Arts and Crafts architects and photographers have considered the highest expression of English vernacular stone building since William Morris first visited in the 1870s. For Chipping Campden wedding photography, the town’s extraordinary architectural coherence — virtually the entire High Street is built in the same golden Jurassic limestone, in the same seventeenth and early eighteenth-century scale, with the same design grammar of gabled dormers and arched doorways — provides portrait backgrounds of singular consistency and beauty from one end of the town to the other.
The High Street, the Market Hall and St James’ Church
Chipping Campden’s High Street — the gently curving limestone street of merchants’ houses from the Silk Mill at the east end to the almshouses at the west — provides a portrait route of extraordinary architectural consistency: every building is in Cotswold limestone, every roofline carries the same Stonesfield limestone tiles, and the street’s gentle curve provides a visual elegance that has the quality of a carefully designed set rather than a town built pragmatically over centuries. The Market Hall of 1627 — the arcaded limestone hall built by Sir Baptist Hicks at the town’s centre, with its arches open to the street and the roof’s gables above — provides the single most architecturally photogenic element in the town. St James’ Church — the great Perpendicular wool church at the town’s north end, with its magnificent tower and the Hicks Chapel’s monuments to Campden’s wool-trade patrons — provides ceremony and exterior portrait settings.
Dover’s Hill, the Kiftsgate Estate and the Cotswold Escarpment
Dover’s Hill — a natural amphitheatre on the Cotswold escarpment above Chipping Campden, the site of the Olympic Games (the annual Cotswold Olimpick Games, established 1612 by Robert Dover) and one of the finest natural viewpoints on the Cotswold Way long-distance path — provides a high escarpment portrait setting with views across the Vale of Evesham and the Malvern Hills beyond available in five minutes’ walk from the town. Kiftsgate Court Garden — a private garden immediately adjacent to Hidcote Manor Garden (National Trust), three miles north — provides the most celebrated rose garden in England (the Kiftsgate rose scrambles over 30 metres across the hillside) for garden portrait sessions in June. The Cotswold Way escarpment south from Campden — through Stanton, Stanway and the villages to Broadway Tower — provides a walking portrait route of continuous architectural and landscape quality.