Wedding Photographer Newmarket — the Gallops, Newmarket Heath and the Thoroughbred Landscape
Newmarket is England’s horse racing capital — a Suffolk town at the edge of the Cambridgeshire chalk where the open heathland of Newmarket Heath has been the home of English thoroughbred racing since Charles II established the royal stud and raced personally on the Heath in the seventeenth century. The Heath’s characteristic landscape of the early morning gallops — the racehorses’ strings walking out before dawn to work on the chalky turf of the Warren Hill, the Bury Hills and the Long Hill gallops above the town, the steam of the horses in the cold morning air and the trainers watching from the observation gallery — provides a specific portrait landscape of thoroughbred horse culture found only on this unique chalk upland. For Newmarket wedding photography, the Heath’s open heathland, the gallop viewpoints and the town’s deep equestrian architectural heritage combine to create a portrait day of quite specific character.
The Jockey Club Rooms, Palace House and the Equestrian Architecture
Newmarket’s built heritage is inseparable from its racing history: the Jockey Club Rooms on the High Street — the Georgian racing governance institution, with its portraits of notable eighteenth and nineteenth-century horses and patrons and the subscription rooms of the racing world’s governing body — provides an institutional wedding venue portrait setting of Georgian equestrian grandeur. Palace House — the restored Charles II/James II royal palace complex on Palace Street, now the National Heritage Centre for Horseracing and Sporting Art — provides a seventeenth century royal connexion portrait setting at the very origin of English thoroughbred racing. The High Street’s Georgian and Victorian townscape of racing colours — the jockeys’ silks in the saddlers’ windows and the terracotta studs over the stable entries — provide a racing-town street portrait setting of unique equestrian character.
Warren Hill, the Devil’s Dyke and the Breckland Heath
Warren Hill gallop’s viewing area — the elevated public viewpoint on the Heath above the town where the early-morning strings can be watched from very close range — provides the most accessible early-morning equestrian portrait setting in England: the horses working on the Warren Hill uphill gallop in the first light, with the town below and the flat Suffolk Heath extending east, create images of specific equestrian sporting culture available only here. The Devil’s Dyke — the fourteen-kilometre Anglo-Saxon defensive earthwork running south-east from Reach to Wood Ditton across the Cambridgeshire chalk, crossing Newmarket Heath at the July Course racecourse — provides an ancient earthwork portrait setting of considerable linear drama. The Breckland heathland east of Newmarket — the Suffolk-Norfolk chalk and sand heath of open rabbit-grazed grassland, belt plantations and ancient flint workings — provides a specific landscape portrait setting of English continental heath character.