Wedding Photographer Hertfordshire — Hatfield House, Brocket Hall and the Chiltern Edge
Hertfordshire is the most densely suburban of England’s Home Counties but contains, in its northern and western reaches, a landscape of considerable quality: the chalk hills around Tring, the Lee Valley and the Maran valley in the east, the gentle wooded countryside of the Chiltern fringe above Berkhamsted, and a collection of historic country houses and private estates that gives the county one of the most distinguished wedding venue portfolios within an hour of London. As a Hertfordshire wedding photographer, I cover the county from the Greater London border at Enfield to the Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire county lines, and from the M25 corridor north to the Cambridgeshire fen-edge near Royston.
Hatfield House, Brocket Hall and Hertfordshire’s Country Houses
Hatfield House is Hertfordshire’s pre-eminent historic house — a Jacobean palace completed in 1611 for Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, in the gardens of which Elizabeth I spent much of her childhood. Its great hall, long gallery, chapels and formal East and West gardens are among the finest sixteenth-century palace interiors and landscape architecture in England. Brocket Hall, two miles from Welwyn Garden City, is a house associated with the Regency Prime Ministers Melbourne and Palmerston, whose park and lake by Lancelot Brown surrounds a Palladian mansion that now operates as a conference and wedding venue. Knebworth House, two miles from Stevenage, provides a Gothic Revival Victorian exterior over a Tudor core — its garden’s formal rose garden and yew walk are highly photogenic in June and July.
The Chiltern Fringe and the Hertfordshire Countryside
The Chiltern Hills enter Hertfordshire above Berkhamsted and provide chalk beech woodland, open downland viewpoints and ancient hill fort sites — Ivinghoe Beacon is the highest point, with views across the whole of Hertfordshire and into Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire on clear days. The Grand Union Canal, following the Bulbourne valley from Berkhamsted to Tring, provides a managed towpath landscape of great natural beauty and easy accessibility for outdoor portrait sessions in addition to any venue’s own grounds. The Lee Valley Regional Park, running north-south through the county along the River Lee, provides a semi-wild riverside landscape of meadows, reed beds and riverside footpaths that is easily accessible from venues throughout the eastern half of Hertfordshire.