Wedding Photographer Whitehall Surrey — Nonsuch Park, the North Downs and the Surrey Hills
Surrey’s wedding photography landscape extends from the Thames Valley’s Runnymede meadows and Windsor’s royal park in the north to the North Downs’ chalk escarpment of the Surrey Hills AONB in the south — providing within a single Surrey portrait day the Magna Carta’s riverside meadow, Henry VIII’s Nonsuch Park at Cheam (the site of England’s most elaborate Tudor fantastical palace), the Epsom Downs’ open chalk grassland and Box Hill’s beech-capped chalk ridge. For Surrey wedding photography in the Whitehall and north Surrey area, the concentration of royal historic landscape — Nonsuch Park’s 57-hectare chased deer park, the Epsom grandstand and the North Downs’ chalk escarpment — provides portrait settings of extraordinary historical and landscape density within twenty minutes of the M25.
Nonsuch Park, Cheam and the Tudor Palace Site
Nonsuch Park — the 57-hectare parkland at Ewell in the London Borough of Sutton, the former site of Henry VIII’s Nonsuch Palace (begun 1538, the most extravagantly decorated Tudor building in England, demolished 1682 by the Countess of Castlemaine) — provides a royal historic park portrait setting of considerable historical resonance: the mansion house of c.1800 at the park’s centre, the park’s ancient oak trees and the medieval woodland fringes of Warren Farm provide portrait settings of royal chased deer park character. The Nonsuch Palace archaeological outline discovered in the twentieth century investigations is marked in the park. Cheam village’s medieval church and the seventeenth-century timber-framed Whitehall house (the building from which Cheam’s modern area name derives) provide intimate village portrait settings adjacent to the park.
Epsom Downs, Box Hill and the North Downs Escarpment
Epsom Downs — the six-furlong chalk downland turf racecourse on the North Downs above Epsom (home of The Derby and The Oaks, English flat racing’s two most prestigious Classic races) with the open chalk grassland SSSI of the Downs providing a hilltop portrait setting of 360-degree views across Surrey and London — provides an open chalk sward portrait setting immediately south of Nonsuch. Box Hill — ten miles south, with the National Trust chalk escarpment summit at 224 metres — provides the Surrey Hills AONB’s primary portrait landmark accessible from the Whitehall Surrey area within thirty minutes. The North Downs Way between Reigate and Box Hill provides a chalk-escarpment portrait route of considerable sustained quality.