Wedding Photographer Peterborough — the Cathedral, Flag Fen and the Nene Valley
Peterborough is one of England’s most ancient settlements — a cathedral city that grew around a Benedictine abbey on the flat Nene valley floor, and whose Norman and Early English cathedral of 1118 to 1238 is one of the supreme Early Gothic buildings in northern Europe. The cathedral’s façade of three vast pointed arches — the largest west front in Europe for several centuries after its construction — frames a ceremonial approach unique in English ecclesiastical architecture and provides the most dramatically theatrical exterior portrait setting available to any couple marrying in Peterborough. For Peterborough wedding photography, I work across the cathedral, its close, the medieval city precincts and the wider Nene valley landscape.
Peterborough Cathedral Close and the City Centre
The cathedral close provides a complete precinct of medieval and early modern canonical buildings: the Bishop’s Palace, the Dean’s House, the thirteenth-century Becket Chapel at the east end of the cemetery and the Minster Precincts gateway. The cathedral interior — whose nave ceiling is the finest twelfth-century painted wooden nave ceiling in existence, depicting the apostles, kings and grotesques in a palette of red, blue and gold — provides a unique natural-light photography environment: the light through the clerestory windows at noon on a clear day illuminates the painted boards from above in a way that makes available-light photography in the nave both technically possible and aesthetically extraordinary. Katherine of Aragon is buried in the cathedral’s north aisle, adding a layer of historical resonance that few English parish churches or cathedrals can match.
Flag Fen, the Nene Valley and Cambridgeshire
Flag Fen to the east of Peterborough is one of England’s most significant Bronze Age sites — the preserved remains of a 3,500-year-old artificial island and causeway in the post-glacial fenland, now a heritage park whose reconstructed Bronze Age roundhouses and open fenland landscape provide a highly unusual natural portrait setting. The Nene Valley Railway (a heritage steam railway running through the Nene Valley Country Park between Peterborough and Wansford) provides a very specific steam-railway portrait setting that is entirely unique to this area. The Cambridgeshire countryside south and east of Peterborough — the fen edge villages, the rolling chalk country around Stilton and Sawtry and the ancient forests of Rockingham — all provide natural portrait settings at short drive distance.