Wedding Photographer St Paul’s Cathedral — Wren’s Dome, the Whispering Gallery and the City Roofscape
St Paul’s Cathedral is London’s supreme architectural monument and the most iconic skyline presence in the City of London — Christopher Wren’s baroque cathedral of 1675–1710 whose 111-metre dome (the second-largest cathedral dome in the world after St Peter’s in Rome) dominates the City’s skyline and can be seen from 25 miles in clear conditions, with the west front’s twin bell towers, the peristyle’s classical columns and the west steps’ broad parade providing an exterior ceremonial approach of London civic grandeur. For St Paul’s Cathedral wedding photography, the cathedral’s interior — the nave’s classical pilasters, the dome’s painted pendentives by James Thornhill and the choir’s Grinling Gibbons woodwork — combined with the exterior’s relationship to the City’s glass towers visible beyond the baroque twin towers in Paternoster Square provide portrait settings of London architectural grandeur of unmatched historical depth.
The Whispering Gallery, the Stone Gallery and the Golden Gallery
St Paul’s interior portrait settings are stratified by height: the Nave’s classical architecture and Thornhill’s painted dome (visible from the nave floor 34 metres below) provide the primary ceremony interior portrait setting; the Whispering Gallery at 30 metres above the nave floor provides the first triforium-level portrait setting with views down into the nave and up into the dome’s lantern; and the Stone Gallery (53 metres) and Golden Gallery (85 metres, below the lantern ball) provide exterior drum-level and cupola-level portrait settings with views across the City’s glass towers and the Thames’ silver line visible south. The dome’s lantern provides London’s highest baroque portrait position with panoramic City views.
Paternoster Square, the Millennium Bridge and the City Dawn
Paternoster Square — the post-war redevelopment north of the cathedral, with William Whitfield’s classical colonnaded buildings forming a formal modern urban square and the Temple Bar gateway (Wren’s original City of London gate re-erected here in 2004) providing a Wren stone arch portrait backdrop beneath the cathedral’s north transept — provides the north exterior portrait setting with contemporary classical urban square character. The Millennium Bridge — Norman Foster’s pedestrian bridge of 2000 providing the axial view from the Thames’ south bank directly to the west front across the river — provides the river-level portrait position from which the cathedral’s most celebrated modern viewpoint composition is available. Pre-dawn access to the cathedral steps provides the City’s most dramatic portrait setting in the amber street-lit quiet before the financial district’s daily crowds arrive.