Wedding Photographer Royal Observatory Greenwich — Wren’s Meridian Hill, the Octagon Room and Greenwich Park
The Royal Observatory Greenwich is one of the world’s most historically significant scientific buildings and London’s most dramatically positioned wedding venue — Christopher Wren’s 1675 hilltop observatory on the crest of Greenwich Park’s hill, whose Octagon Room was both a royal reception room and a precision astronomy chamber, now provides a venue of unique intersection between royal Baroque architecture, measuring the world’s time and the unmatched panoramic view of the Thames Valley. The Meridian Courtyard’s brass Meridian line — the Prime Meridian of the World at 0° longitude, where visitors can stand in two hemispheres simultaneously — provides a portrait setting of unique global geographical significance. For Royal Observatory Greenwich wedding photography, the hilltop position, the Peter Harrison Planetarium’s titanium cone and the panoramic London view provide portrait settings of considerable maritime-scientific-capital grandeur.
The Meridian Hill, the Octagon Room and the Panoramic Thames View
The Royal Observatory’s hilltop position on the crest of Greenwich Park — the 47-metre high ridge above the Thames valley — provides the most remarkable panoramic view available at any London wedding venue: looking north from the Meridian Courtyard, the view encompasses the Queen’s House’s white Palladian facade directly below, the O2 arena’s dome on the Isle of Dogs, Canary Wharf’s towers and the entire sweep of the Thames from the Pool of London to the Estuary beyond. The Wren building’s Octagon Room — a state room of tall windows designed to show the king and queen of Charles II’s court the stars between the astronomer’s observations — provides an interior portrait setting of Baroque scientific palatial character found nowhere else in London.
Greenwich Park, the Queen’s House and the Painted Hall
Greenwich Park — the 183-acre Royal Park on the hill crest above the Queen’s House and the Old Royal Naval College, designed by Le Nôtre (Charles II’s French garden designer) and regraded in the 1660s as a formal French park with the central avenue of chestnuts providing the primary vista from the hilltop to the Thames — provides a large-scale formal park portrait setting of seventeenth-century French landscape design. The Queen’s House — Inigo Jones’s 1619 pure Italian Palladian villa below the Observatory, now the National Maritime Museum’s art gallery with Romney and Gainsborough in the collection — provides an exterior Palladian portrait setting directly below the Observatory. The Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College in the park below — James Thornhill’s enormous Baroque painted ceiling completed 1727, England’s Sistine Chapel — provides an interior portrait setting of maximum Baroque ceiling painting drama.