Wedding Photographer Madingley Hall — Tudor Hall, the Walled Garden and Cambridge’s Countryside
Madingley Hall is Cambridge University’s own historic country house — a Tudor manor of 1543 built for Sir John Hynde, set in Lancelot Brown’s 1756 landscape park four miles west of Cambridge, whose walled garden, the south-facing terrace and the specimen trees of the parkland provide a classic English country house portrait setting of Tudor architecture in a Georgian landscape. As the University of Cambridge’s continuing education centre, Madingley Hall combines the academic prestige of the University with the intimacy and quiet of a small Tudor house in open Cambridgeshire countryside. For Madingley Hall wedding photography, the combination of the Tudor house’s warm red brick, the walled garden’s colour and the Brown landscape provides a portrait setting of considerable intimacy and historical depth within striking distance of Cambridge.
The Tudor Hall, the South Terrace and the Capability Brown Parkland
Madingley Hall’s principal facade — the Tudor hall’s elongated east front of red brick with its original sixteenth-century mullioned windows, the projecting porch and the Dutch-gabled attic roofline added in the seventeenth century — provides an exterior architectural portrait backdrop of English Tudor domestic architecture of moderate scale but considerable charm. Lancelot Brown’s 1756 landscape park — his earliest and simplest Cambridgeshire commission, forming the broad lawn below the south terrace, the serpentine lake behind the stable block and the specimen trees providing the characteristic Brown landscape pattern — provides a Georgian landscape portrait setting of the intimate country-house park variety. The south terrace’s herbaceous border and the parkland view south toward the Bourn Brook provide a classical portrait composition of English Tudor house in Georgian landscape.
The Walled Garden, the American Cemetery and Cambridge’s Proximity
Madingley Hall’s walled garden — the substantial kitchen garden enclosure within the brick walls to the north of the house, replanted as a formal ornamental and productive garden with herbaceous borders, standard roses and trained fruit trees against the warm brick — provides an enclosed garden portrait setting of considerable warmth and intimacy. The Cambridge American Cemetery — the American Battle Monuments Commission Cemetery immediately opposite the hall on the Madingley road, whose 3,812 graves in a formal geometric layout in the yew-enclosed landscape and the Memorial Wall of the missing provide a sombre and quietly beautiful adjacent landscape — provides a reflective portrait setting of extraordinary American-European historical depth within walking distance. Cambridge itself — the King’s College Backs, Clare Bridge and the Cam punts — is accessible in fifteen minutes for early-morning portrait sessions.