Wedding Photographer Ham House — Stuart Grandeur, the Thames and Richmond’s Royal Parks
Ham House is one of the most completely preserved baroque houses in Britain — a Thames-side mansion built in 1610 and radically enlarged in the 1670s for the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale, whose ambition was to create a house that matched the finest continental palaces of their time. The result is an interior of panelled apartments, parquet floors, embroidered curtains and original furnishings that remain substantially as they were in 1677 — a time capsule of late Stuart taste administered by the National Trust. For Ham House wedding photography, this provides ceremony and portrait settings of outstanding historic and aesthetic quality within a managed National Trust property on the Thames riverbank in the heart of the Richmond world heritage area.
Ham House Gardens and the Thames Riverside
The formal gardens at Ham House — reconstructed from the 1671 survey of the original parterres by the National Trust in the 1970s — are among the most historically authentic baroque gardens in England. The Cherry Garden, the Wilderness (a formal tree garden with clipped hedges and grass plats) and the walled kitchen garden provide a sequence of distinct outdoor spaces all within the Ham House estate. The Thames towpath immediately below the house provides a riverside walking route of great natural beauty, with Marble Hill House visible across the river on the Twickenham bank and the Petersham meadows providing open floodplain landscape between Ham and Richmond. Richmond Park, seven minutes’ walk from Ham House, provides wild deer, ancient oak trees and the King Henry VIII mound view — the only protected view of St Paul’s Cathedral from a royal park far west of central London.
Richmond’s Royal Parks and the Greater Surrey Thames
The Richmond, Kew and Petersham area constitutes the most concentrated collection of historic royal landscapes in Greater London outside Greenwich. Kew Gardens — fifteen minutes walk along the towpath from Ham House — provides licensed wedding ceremony spaces within the glasshouses, the Japanese Pagoda garden and the arboretum areas; the view across the Kew Green from the Thames towpath is among the finest urban river views in London. Richmond Green — the historic town green with Palladian-influenced Georgian townhouses on three sides — provides an enclosed, formal urban landscape setting of considerable quality for couples who want portraits with an architectural and historical sense of place grounded specifically in the English riverside town tradition.