Wedding Photographer Newcastle — Quayside, the Tyne Bridge, Gibside and Northumberland
Newcastle upon Tyne is England’s finest Victorian industrial city for wedding photography — a city whose combination of the Georgian architect John Dobson’s remarkable Grey Street and its curved Corinthian terrace (voted England’s finest street in a BBC poll), the seven bridges of the Tyne Gorge and the Gateshead Quayside’s cultural quarter of Baltic, the Sage and the Millennium Bridge creates a portrait environment of industrial urban grandeur of a quality and character found nowhere else in England. For Newcastle wedding photography, the city’s industrial architectural heritage — the Victorian colliery engine houses, the Quayside’s converted Bond warehouse and the Ouseburn Valley’s industrial byway — combines with the Tyne’s dramatic gorge bridges and Northumberland’s historic landscape north of the city to provide a portrait day of extraordinary range and diversity.
The Tyne Bridges, Grey Street and the Quayside
The Tyne Gorge’s bridge suite — the Tyne Bridge of 1928, the Swing Bridge, the High Level Bridge (Robert Stephenson, 1849), the Gateshead Millennium Bridge and the King Edward VII Railway Bridge together spanning the gorge in a sequence of Victorian and modern bridge engineering — provides the Tyne’s primary portrait backdrop: from the Gateshead bank looking north to the Newcastle Quayside, from the Quayside footpath looking east to the bridge stack, or from below at riverside level, the bridges provide portrait compositions of industrial engineering heritage of the highest possible quality. Grey Street’s curved Corinthian terrace — the finest surviving example of Dobson’s early Victorian planned city centre design, with the Theatre Royal at the bottom of the curve — provides an urban architectural portrait setting of classical street composition.
Gibside, Northumberland and the Hall of the East
Gibside — the National Trust eighteenth-century designed landscape of the Bowes family above the River Derwent seven miles south-west of the city, whose ruined hall, the Gibbs Column of British Liberty (140-foot column with a Liberty figure), the Gothic chapel and the formal avenue align in an axial landscape of Baroque grandeur extraordinary for its survival in an industrial region — provides a country house portrait setting of unusual Gothic-classical contrast and romantic ruin character. Northumberland north of the city — Hadrian’s Wall corridor (accessible in forty minutes), the Northumberland National Park, the castles of Alnwick, Bamburgh and Dunstanburgh and the Northumberland coast — provides portrait landscape settings of Roman frontier, medieval castle and wild coastal character within a one-hour drive for day-after sessions.