Wedding Photographer Hampshire — New Forest, Winchester Cathedral, the Test Valley and the Solent
Hampshire is one of England’s most historically and scenically distinguished counties for wedding photography — a county whose geographical range encompasses the ancient royal hunting forest of the New Forest in the south-west, the chalk downland of the South Downs AONB above Meon and Test valleys, the medieval city of Winchester at the county’s centre and the Solent’s complex estuarine coastline running from the Test at Southampton to Chichester Harbour in the east. For Hampshire wedding photography, this geographical diversity means that every venue in the county is within thirty minutes of a landscape portrait setting of national quality — from the New Forest’s ancient oak woodland to the Test valley’s crystal chalk stream and from Winchester Cathedral’s Norman nave to the Solent’s tidal flats.
Winchester: Cathedral, the High Street and St Cross Hospital
Winchester’s Cathedral — the longest medieval cathedral in England (170 metres), whose Norman crypt, the Perpendicular nave and the retrochoir’s Early English arcade represent the most complete sequence of English medieval architectural periods in any single building — provides ceremony and portrait settings of maximum English ecclesiastical historical depth. The Cathedral Close — with the Deanery garden, the Pilgrims’ Hall and the medieval college buildings on College Street — provides an enclosed ecclesiastical quarter of medieval domestic character immediately adjacent to the Cathedral. St Cross Hospital — the twelfth-century almshouse south of the city, founding date 1136 and the oldest almshouse in England still in charitable use, with its Norman church, the brothers’ hall and the formal walled garden — provides a second portrait setting in Winchester of quite different medieval institutional character.
The New Forest, the Test Valley and the Solent Coast
The New Forest — William the Conqueror’s medieval hunting forest, established as a royal hunting ground in 1079 and maintained largely intact as an area of open common land, ancient pasture woodland and heathland — provides portrait settings of ancient native woodland character available nowhere else in southern England: the ancient oak and beech pollards of Mark Ash Wood and Denny Wood, the open heather moorland of Beaulieu Heath and the free-range New Forest ponies grazing the common provide a portrait landscape of unique ecological depth. The River Test — arguably England’s finest chalk stream, whose crystal-clear water and water-meadow setting between Stockbridge and Romsey provide a specific chalk-stream river portrait environment of extraordinary clarity and ecological richness — provides a waterside portrait setting of the kind available only on Hampshire’s chalk streams. The Solent’s tidal inlets at Beaulieu, Hamble and Bosham — small estuarine villages of sailing and fishing tradition — provide coastal portrait settings of intimate maritime character specific to the east Solent coast.