Wedding Photographer Richmond — the Park, the Thames and the Royal Borough
Richmond upon Thames is the most naturally beautiful of all London’s river boroughs — a royal suburb whose combination of the largest urban parkland in Europe, a Georgian riverside town and the most photogenic stretch of the tidal Thames west of Kew provides wedding photography settings of consistent, high quality available from a wide range of Richmond’s licensed ceremony venues. Richmond Park’s 2,360 acres of ancient royal parkland, with its herds of free-roaming red and fallow deer running through landscape managed since Charles I’s time without agricultural improvement, is the single most extraordinary urban natural portrait location in England. For Richmond wedding photography, the park’s ancient oaks alone provide a level of photographic drama that would be the principal feature of any national park.
Richmond Park, the Deer and the Ancient Oaks
Richmond Park’s Isabella Plantation — a woodland garden of azaleas and rhododendrons within the park that flowers in late April and May — provides the most spectacular natural colour available in any London royal park in the spring season and creates portrait settings of extraordinary natural intensity whose photographic character is entirely different from the rest of the year. The King Henry VIII Mound — a prehistoric earthwork in the north-east corner of the park whose sight line to St Paul’s Cathedral dome has been protected since 1710 — provides a distant-view portrait setting with the London skyline visible on the southern horizon and the park stretching away in every other direction. Pen Ponds — the two ornamental lakes at the park’s centre — provide water reflection portraits with the deer frequently visible grazing on the surrounding banks.
Richmond Town, the Thames Towpath and Petersham Meadows
Richmond town itself — the market square, Richmond Green’s formal Georgian town green flanked by Palladian and Queen Anne townhouses, the medieval Richmond Gate and the Richmond Bridge (the oldest surviving Thames bridge, 1777) — provides a formal urban portrait landscape of consistent architectural quality. The Thames towpath south from Richmond Bridge toward Ham and Twickenham passes through Petersham Meadows — the open floodplain between Richmond and Ham that has remained unbuilt since Norman times, with Richmond Hill above one side and the Thames below — providing one of the few genuinely rural river landscape portraits available within the Greater London boundary. Marble Hill House across the river at Twickenham, with its Palladian riverside facade, provides a formal architectural backdrop visible from the Richmond towpath at all times of year.