Wedding Photographer Old Bridge Hotel Huntingdon — Cromwell’s Town, the Great Ouse and Hemingford Grey Manor
The Old Bridge Hotel is Huntingdon’s finest hotel and the Cambridgeshire town’s most distinguished wedding venue — a handsome early eighteenth-century former bank building of warm red brick above the Great Ouse’s west bank at the medieval bridge, whose riverside terrace, the first-floor dining rooms looking east over the river and the garden’s waterside setting provide a characteristically English riverside hotel wedding experience in Oliver Cromwell’s own birthplace town. For Old Bridge Hotel Huntingdon wedding photography, the hotel’s Great Ouse riverside setting, the medieval bridge and the broader landscape of the Ouse valley between Huntingdon and Cambridge provide a portrait environment of East Midlands market town and chalk river character of considerable distinctive quality.
The Great Ouse Riverside, the Medieval Bridge and the Hotel Terrace
The Old Bridge Hotel’s terrace above the Great Ouse — the riverside garden on the hotel’s east side where the Ouse’s broad, slow-moving current passes below the lime trees and the willow fronds trail in the water — provides a waterside portrait setting of considerable Cambridgeshire river character: the Ouse here is already broad and mature after draining the Northamptonshire uplands and the Middle Nene, with a reflective, level-landscape river portrait character quite different from the Cambridge Cam’s punting reach. The medieval bridge of Huntingdon — the multi-arched stone bridge at the hotel’s end — provides additional bridge portrait settings. Cromwell’s birthplace — the house in the High Street where Oliver Cromwell was born in 1599 — provides a historical connexion portrait setting within short walk.
Hemingford Grey Manor, Godmanchester and the Ouse Valley
Hemingford Grey village — two miles east of Huntingdon along the Ouse towpath, containing the oldest continuously inhabited domestic house in England (the Norman Manor House of Hemingford Grey, built c.1130 and inhabited to the present day, made famous by Lucy Boston’s ‘Green Knowe’ novels) and the medieval church of St James partly submerged in the flood meadow beside the river — provides a portrait setting of extraordinary continuous human habitation depth accessible by towpath walk from the hotel. Godmanchester — the village immediately across the bridge from Huntingdon, with its remarkably complete and intact Georgian domestic architecture of the prosperous market town and the Chinese Bridge over the mill brook — provides an adjacent Georgian portrait setting. The Ouse valley’s water meadows between Huntingdon and St Ives provide extensive riverside landscape portrait settings of Cambridgeshire fenland edge character.