Wedding Photographer Port Lympne — Herbert Baker Mansion, the Trojan Steps Garden and the Romney Marsh
Port Lympne Historic House and Wildlife Park is one of Kent’s most unusually positioned and most architecturally individual country house wedding venues — a neo-Cape Dutch mansion designed by Herbert Baker for Sir Philip Sassoon in 1912, set on the same Aldington Ridge above the Romney Marsh as the adjacent medieval Lympne Castle, with the Trojan Steps’ formal garden descending the ridge in a series of geometric terraces toward the Marsh below. The house’s association with the political and cultural elite of the early twentieth century — Churchill, Lloyd George and Rex Whistler among others — gives Port Lympne a specific interwar country house culture of considerable social-historical depth. For Port Lympne wedding photography, the Cape Dutch architecture, the Trojan Steps garden’s formal terraces and the Romney Marsh panorama provide a portrait setting of quite specific early twentieth-century Arts and Crafts regional character.
The Trojan Steps Garden, the Terraces and the Romney Marsh View
The Trojan Steps — Herbert Baker’s formal garden descending the Aldington Ridge in a sequence of geometric brick-paved terraces from the mansion’s south terrace down toward the Marsh, with the swimming pool terrace’s Rex Whistler mural and the lower terraces’ clipped hedges and formal planting — provide Port Lympne’s primary portrait landscape: the descending terrace sequence, with the Romney Marsh’s extraordinary flat-land panorama visible at each level below and the Marsh’s horizon reaching to the Channel coast at Dungeness, provides a composed architectural-naturallandscape portrait setting of considerable spatial drama. The enclosed terrace gardens — the Rose Garden, the Striped Garden and the Staircase Garden with their clipped symmetrical formal planting — provide additional enclosed garden portrait settings of interwar formal garden design character.
The Wild Animal Park, Dungeness and the Kent Coast
Port Lympne’s Wild Animal Park — the African experience and the rare species conservation programme that now occupies the park landscape surrounding the mansion — provides a quite specific portrait setting context of African landscape design within Kent: the African Experience’s open-range territory visible from the mansion’s upper terraces provides a portrait backdrop of African savanna designed landscape that is quite unexpected and unusual in an English coastal county. Dungeness — the shingle headland eighteen miles south-east, the largest single shingle accumulation in Europe and one of the most unusually beautiful Kentish coastal landscapes, with Derek Jarman’s cottage garden, the old lighthouse and the surreal flatness of the shingle — provides a specific Kentish coastal portrait setting of absolute flat shingle and sky character for day-after sessions.