Wedding Photographer The Ned London — Lutyens’ 1924 Banking Hall and the City of London
The Ned at 27 Poultry in the City of London is one of the capital’s most historically significant and most atmospherically distinctive hotel wedding venues — the former Midland Bank headquarters designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, whose magnificent banking hall (the world’s largest when completed in 1939) with its marble columns, coffered ceiling and mosaic floor has been converted to a destination hotel and event space while retaining all its original Lutyens classical grandeur intact. For The Ned London wedding photography, the building’s sequence of Lutyens classical interiors — from the principal banking hall’s 100-metre marble colonnade through the vault corridor to the rooftop deck’s City-tower panorama — provides portrait settings of 1930s City of London mercantile architecture of international museum-grade quality.
The Lutyens Banking Hall Interior and the Classical Architecture
The principal banking hall — a 100-metre-long classical hall of green Portland stone columns in pairs supporting the coffered ceiling, the original banking counters’ green marble running the full hall length and the mosaic floor’s geometric pattern — provides the primary ceremony and formal portrait setting: the sequence of columns’ receding perspective, the coffered ceiling’s classical plasterwork and the hall’s extraordinary length create portrait compositions of 1930s banking-hall classicism of a scale available in very few London venues. Lutyens’ characteristic Portland stone detailing — the carved column capitals, the door architraves and the ornamental keystones — provides portrait detail backdrops of classical masonry character throughout the building.
The City of London Setting, the Bank Junction and the Rooftop View
The Ned’s location at the Bank junction — the City’s historic commercial centre where the Bank of England’s curtain wall, the Royal Exchange’s classical portico and the Mansion House’s Palladian facade surround the junction visible from the Ned’s entrance — provides exterior arrival portrait settings of the City of London’s most historically concentrated square. The rooftop pool deck above the Lutyens building provides a City skyline portrait at the level of the surrounding glass towers, with the BT Tower to the north-west and the Gherkin immediately north-east visible in the panorama behind the portrait subjects. Evening golden hour on the rooftop with the City in amber light provides the most sought-after portrait moment at The Ned.