Wedding Photographer Wells — the Cathedral, Bishop’s Palace Moat, Vicars’ Close and the Somerset Mendips
Wells is England’s smallest city — a medieval cathedral city of extraordinary completeness and quality, where the Cathedral Close’s unified medieval precinct of cathedral, Bishop’s Palace, Vicar’s Close and the Chain Gate creates a wholly medieval urban environment of a completeness unmatched in England: the cathedral church of St Andrew (begun c.1175), the Bishop’s Palace’s moat and the famous swan bell-ringing (the swans have rung the drawbridge bell for food since the 1870s), the Cathedral Chapter House’s undulating stone staircase and Vicars’ Close’s fourteenth-century street of priests’ houses — the oldest continuously inhabited complete medieval street in Europe. For Wells wedding photography, this unrivalled concentration of medieval English ecclesiastical architecture within a few hundred metres provides portrait settings of English cathedral close character at maximum density.
Wells Cathedral, the West Front Sculpture and the Chain Gate
Wells Cathedral’s west front — the broadest Gothic facade in England, with 297 surviving medieval sculptural figures arranged in registers across the twin-towered screen facade, representing the largest surviving medieval sculptural programme in England — provides the primary exterior cathedral portrait setting: the warm Doulting limestone’s pale honey colour, the sculptural programme’s narrative richness and the lawn of the Cathedral Green in front provide portrait compositions of English medieval Gothic facade of quite extraordinary sculptural completeness. The cathedral interior’s scissor arches — the unique inverted-arch bracing of the nave crossing added c.1338 to support the settling tower — provide one of the most architecturally distinctive medieval interior portrait compositions in England.
Vicars’ Close, the Bishop’s Palace and the Mendip Hills
Vicars’ Close — the fourteenth-century cobbled street of 42 identical priests’ houses with the chapel at the north end and the Chain Gate above at the south, the entire street of c.1363 surviving intact with the original proportions and the perspective of the Close’s narrowing receding medieval facades — provides the most photogenically complete medieval English street portrait setting: the parallel rows of medieval facade receding to the chapel gable in a single composition of extraordinary medieval completeness. The Bishop’s Palace moat’s willow-draped water and the drawbridge bridge of medieval character provide water-garden portrait settings of the episcopal palace enclosure character.