Wedding Photographer Stamford — England’s Most Beautiful Town, Burghley House and the Welland Valley
Stamford is universally regarded by architectural historians as England’s most beautiful stone-built town — a Lincolnshire market town of five medieval churches and an extraordinary concentration of first-class medieval, Tudor, Georgian and Victorian architecture all built in the warm limestone of the Lincolnshire oolite belt, whose conservation area of twenty-six miles of listed buildings and five church steeples visible from the Welland meadows below provides a portrait setting of English limestone town completeness unmatched outside the Cotswolds. For Stamford wedding photography, the town’s concentration of medieval and Georgian architecture of consistently high quality, Burghley House’s baroque parks immediately south and the Welland’s meadow-side portrait settings provide a portrait environment of English limestone town landscape of the highest possible standard within easy reach of Cambridge, Peterborough and Leicester.
The Medieval Churches, the George Hotel and the Georgian Streetscape
Stamford’s medieval townscape — the five church towers of All Saints, St Mary’s, St Martin’s, St John the Baptist and St George visible from the meadows below the town, each providing a different view-angle portrait of the church-and-town skyline composition — provides the primary exterior portrait setting of the town. The George Hotel of Stamford — the coaching inn of probable seventeenth-century core on St Martin’s High Street, with the gallows-sign crossing the street and the courtyard behind providing one of England’s finest coaching-inn portrait settings — provides the wedding venue itself with considerable architectural character. St Martin’s High Street’s limestone Georgian and Regency houses — the most consistently beautiful street in Stamford, with the unbroken limestone facade of three centuries of prosperous market town domestic building — provide a street portrait setting of English oolite limestone architecture.
Burghley House, the Welland Meadows and the Lincolnshire Limestone
Burghley House — the largest and grandest Elizabethan country house in England, built 1555–87 for William Cecil, first Baron Burghley and Lord Treasurer to Elizabeth I, in the parkland immediately south of Stamford with Capability Brown’s park of 1756 surrounding the Elizabethan palace — provides a portrait setting of Elizabethan royal-patronage country house architecture of maximum grandeur: the roofline’s turrets, obelisks and chimneys, the 321-metre frontage and the Jacobean gatehouse visible across Brown’s lake provide portrait compositions of English Elizabethan country house of quite extraordinary scale. The Welland meadows south of Stamford — the river meadows below Burghley’s south park where the Welland’s slow chalk stream reflects the willows and the Burghley roofline — provide waterside portrait settings on the approach to Burghley’s south front.