Wedding Photographer Kent — the Garden of England, its Castles and the White Cliffs Coast
Kent is England’s most castle-dense county and the traditional ‘Garden of England’ — a consequence of its combination of chalk downland, clay weald, the Romney Marsh, the Thames estuary shore and the Channel coastline, which together make it one of the most topographically varied counties in southern England and one of the most historically important as the main route for invasion, pilgrimage and Continental influence into Britain for two thousand years. For Kent wedding photography, this translates into an extraordinary range of venue and landscape options: medieval castles, moated manor houses, converted oast houses in the hop garden landscape, Regency seaside townscapes, White Cliffs clifftop settings and the broad-skied estuary of the North Kent shore.
Kent’s Castles, Country Houses and the Weald
Leeds Castle — the most photographically spectacular castle in England, sitting on two islands in a lake in the Kentish Weald — provides a ceremony and portrait setting of genuine fairytale visual character, reflected in water and surrounded by formal gardens, a maze and a vineyard. Hever Castle, the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, provides a sixteenth-century moated castle with formal Italianate and Tudor gardens added by William Waldorf Astor. Penshurst Place, Knole House (one of the largest private houses in England), Sissinghurst (Vita Sackville-West’s garden), Scotney Castle and Chartwell (Churchill’s home) all provide country house, castle and garden portrait settings of the highest quality within a county that has the most concentrated collection of historic properties of any English shire county.
The White Cliffs, Canterbury and the North Downs
Canterbury Cathedral — the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the mother church of the Anglican Communion — is one of the great European Gothic buildings and provides ceremony photography of the highest ecclesiastical grandeur for the city’s cathedral marriages. The White Cliffs of Dover — the white chalk cliffs above the Channel coast between Deal in the east and Folkestone in the west — provide a coastal portrait setting of enormous symbolic resonance: the clifftop South Foreland footpath looks back across the Straits of Dover to France on clear days and provides the most dramatically open coastal portrait setting on the entire east coast. The North Downs escarpment, running across the county from Farnham in Surrey to Dover, provides its own chalk grassland, ancient yew woodland and Pilgrim’s Way views that are distinct from both the Weald below and the coastal settings to the north and south.