Wedding Photographer Henley — the Regatta Town, Temple Island and the Chiltern Hills
Henley-on-Thames is England’s most famous rowing town — the site since 1839 of the Royal Henley Regatta, still the most prestigious amateur rowing event in the world, and a Thames-side market town of great architectural charm. Its Georgian and Regency townscape, the five-arch eighteenth-century bridge, the decorated finials of the Henley Bridge, the Angel on the Bridge pub overhanging the water and the meadow approach from the north bank all provide portrait settings of exceptional English riverside character. As a Henley wedding photographer, I work across the town, the Regatta meadows and the wider Chiltern Hills and the Thames Valley between Marlow and Pangbourne.
Temple Island, the Regatta Course and Hambleden
Temple Island — the small eyot at the head of the Henley Regatta course, topped by an eighteenth-century fishing temple designed by James Wyatt — is one of the most charming and recognisable features of the entire Thames. It can be accessed by hired boat and provides a completely unique setting for romantic outdoor portrait work: mid-river, surrounded by the willows and meadow grasses of the Hambleden valley and with the ancient weir pool and lock below the course. The Hambleden valley immediately north of Henley — with its thatched flint-and-brick village, the Hambleden Mill weir and the ancient church — is one of the most photogenic valleys in the Chilterns and provides a quintessential English countryside portrait setting within ten minutes of the town centre.
The Chiltern Hills and the Oxfordshire Thames Valley
The Chiltern Hills rise sharply north and east of Henley through a landscape of beech woodland, chalk grassland and ancient valleys that stretches from the Buckinghamshire/Hertfordshire fringe to the Thames valley floor. Stonor Park — a Catholic recusant house of great antiquity in a high chalk valley above Henley — provides a country house and deer park setting of exceptional beauty within fifteen minutes of the town. The Oxfordshire Thames from Henley north to Streatley on the Berkshire-Oxfordshire border passes through a sequence of river towns (Wallingford, Dorchester-on-Thames with its great abbey) and manages the kind of gentle, pastoral English river beauty that gives Thames Valley wedding photography its characteristic warm, hazy character in summer afternoon light.