Wedding Photographer Eastbourne — Beachy Head, the Seven Sisters Cliffs and the Victorian Seafront
Eastbourne is East Sussex’s most distinguished Victorian seaside resort — a town planned in the 1850s and 1860s by the seventh Duke of Devonshire whose geometric street grid, the Grand Parade seafront terrace, the Devonshire Park and the Winter Garden provide a Victorian planned townscape of considerable urban order and architectural dignity at the foot of the South Downs. For Eastbourne wedding photography, the town’s appeal lies principally in its proximity to two of England’s most dramatic coastal landscapes: Beachy Head’s 162-metre chalk headland to the west and the Seven Sisters chalk cliff traverse east to Cuckmere Haven — together constituting the most spectacular white cliff coastal portrait setting available on the entire south coast of England.
Beachy Head, Belle Tout and the Chalk Headland
Beachy Head — the highest and most exposed chalk headland on the English Channel coast, rising 162 metres above the red-and-white striped Belle Tout and Beachy Head lighthouses at the cliff base — provides portrait settings of extreme coastal vertical drama: the cliff edge’s immediate drop to the sea, the lighthouse visible far below, the horizon of the Channel stretching to Dieppe on clear days and the open South Downs plateau behind the headland create portrait images of unmatched coastal vertical scale. Belle Tout lighthouse itself — the Victorian disused lighthouse on the headland, now a private hotel, with its lens room and the chalk cliff edge immediately adjacent — provides a portrait setting of romantic coastal isolation. The headland’s summer wildflower plateau — pyramidal orchid, horseshoe vetch and round-headed rampion in the chalk turf — provides seasonal botanical portrait texture.
The Seven Sisters, Cuckmere Haven and the South Downs
The Seven Sisters — the sequence of eight chalk headlands (seven ‘sisters’ named for each headland) between Birling Gap and Seaford Head, the most extensive undeveloped chalk cliff coastline in England — provides a portrait setting of white cliff, blue-green sea and open sky of maximum coastal dramatic impact: the view of the Sisters from the Cuckmere Haven beach at the mouth of the Cuckmere valley, with the cliff sequence receding west in the afternoon light, is one of the most immediately recognisable landscape images in England. Cuckmere Haven — the SSSI beach at the Cuckmere’s mouth, backed by the meandering river’s oxbow loops and the ShortGate nature reserve — provides a coastal plain river-mouth portrait setting of unusual ecological richness and visual complexity. Alfriston village — the medieval market village six miles north in the Cuckmere valley — provides a Sussex flint and timbered village setting in the valley below the Downs.