Wedding Photographer Natural History Museum — Hintze Hall, the Romanesque Terracotta Cathedral and the Blue Whale
The Natural History Museum in South Kensington is one of the world’s most architecturally magnificent museum buildings — Alfred Waterhouse’s 1881 Romanesque Revival terracotta palace of 675 feet of facade along Cromwell Road, whose twin towers, the carved terracotta decoration of plants and animals on every surface and the cathedral-like proportions of the central Hintze Hall create an interior of quite overwhelming natural history Gothic grandeur. The Hintze Hall — the central nave of the museum, 170 feet long and 75 feet high under the vaulted terracotta ceiling, containing the blue whale skeleton suspended from the roof and flanked by the terracotta column arcades bearing carvings of living and extinct species — provides a wedding venue portrait setting of a very specific character: the combination of Victorian monumental institutional architecture and natural history spectacle on an unmatched scale. For Natural History Museum wedding photography, the Hintze Hall’s blue whale, the terracotta vault and the grand staircase together constitute an interior portrait environment unique in London.
The Hintze Hall, the Blue Whale and the Grand Staircase
The Hintze Hall’s principal portrait elements for wedding photography are four: the blue whale skeleton suspended from the vaulted ceiling (97 feet long, replacing the Diplodocus cast in 2017 with the more astronomically-scaled blue whale, the largest animal that has ever lived), the colonnaded arcade of terracotta pillars lining both sides of the hall with their carved natural history ornament, the grand staircase of Portland stone at the hall’s north end rising from the entrance level to the galleries above, and the large arched window above the staircase through which the natural light falls. Together these four elements create a portrait composition of Victorian natural history Gothic grandeur of the most spectacular possible kind for a London interior wedding portrait.
The Cromwell Road Facade, Albertopolis and the South Kensington Museums
The museum’s Cromwell Road facade — Waterhouse’s long Romanesque Revival terracotta elevation with its elaborate carved animal and plant ornament, the twin towers flanking the central entrance arch and the blue-grey terracotta of Waterhouse’s own specific colour selection — provides exterior architectural portrait settings of Victorian museum grandeur comparable in scale only to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Cromwell Road facade directly opposite. The Albertopolis museum quarter of South Kensington — the cluster of major national museums and Imperial College buildings on the land purchased from the proceeds of the 1851 Great Exhibition — provides an additional South Kensington cultural portrait landscape extending to the Albert Hall, the Albert Memorial and the Royal Albert Hall’s Victorian brick rotunda within five minutes’ walk northwards.