Wedding Photographer Leeds — the Grand Civic City, Roundhay Park and the Yorkshire Countryside
Leeds is Yorkshire’s largest city and one of the most architecturally rich Victorian cities in England — a product of the West Riding wool trade whose Victorian prosperity paid for a town hall, arcades and market halls of exceptional quality. For Leeds wedding photography, the city offers a dual character: an extraordinary Victorian urban landscape in the city centre — the Corn Exchange’s elliptical cast-iron dome, the Victoria Quarter’s stained glass arcade roof, Leeds Town Hall’s Corinthian colonnade — and, beyond the city’s northern edge, one of England’s great urban parks and direct access to the Yorkshire Dales, the Wharfe Valley and the moors of West Yorkshire.
The Victorian City Centre and Roundhay Park
The Leeds city centre’s Victorian and Edwardian architecture provides a dense, high-quality urban portrait landscape within easy walk of any city centre venue: Briggate — the Victorian commercial main street — passes the Grand Theatre, the Marks and Spencer original Penny Bazaar site and the Victoria Quarter’s glazed Victorian shopping arcade (whose leaded stained-glass roof by Brian Clarke is one of the finest pieces of twentieth-century decorative glass in Britain). The Corn Exchange, the City Square with Black Prince and Alfred Drury’s nymph statues, the Civic Hall Art Deco façade and Kirkgate Market provide a sequence of Victorian and 1930s architectural portrait settings of genuine grandeur all within fifteen minutes’ walk of each other. Roundhay Park — Leeds’s 700-acre municipal park north of the city, with the ornamental Upper and Lower Lakeside walks and the Canal Gardens rose garden — provides the finest formal park setting within the city.
Harewood House, the Wharfe Valley and the Yorkshire Countryside
Harewood House — the seat of the Earl of Harewood, built in 1759 to designs by John Carr and Robert Adam in the Capability Brown parkland above Wharfedale — is eight miles north of Leeds city centre and provides one of the finest country house and estate settings in the north of England: the house’s south terrace, the Brown park and lake, the Himalayan Garden and the Staircase Hall with its Robert Adam plasterwork provide wedding photography settings of the highest quality. The Wharfe Valley from Wetherby to Bolton Abbey provides its own sequence of river, woodland and moorland portrait settings that are available for day-after sessions at any Leeds wedding. Bolton Abbey’s ruined nave on the Wharfe bank, Grassington’s limestone village street and the Strid gorge all provide Yorkshire Dales settings within forty minutes of the city centre.