Wedding Photographer Winchester — the Cathedral, the Great Hall, the College and the Itchen Valley
Winchester is England’s ancient capital and Hampshire’s most historically significant city — the royal capital of the Anglo-Saxon kings of Wessex and of England from Alfred the Great to the Norman Conquest, whose surviving medieval landscape of the cathedral, the College’s fourteenth-century flint and stone closes, the Great Hall’s remaining Arthurian Round Table and the medieval Butter Cross in the High Street provides a portrait environment of English medieval kingship of extraordinary historical depth. For Winchester wedding photography, the cathedral’s nave (the longest medieval nave in Europe at 170 metres), the Cathedral Close’s calm lawned precinct, the College’s fifteenth-century Flint Court and the Itchen’s chalk stream water meadows below the city combine to provide portrait settings of English medieval and natural landscape of the most concentrated quality.
Winchester Cathedral, the Close and Jane Austen’s Memorial
Winchester Cathedral — the Norman and Gothic cathedral begun by Bishop Walkelin in 1079 on the foundations of the Anglo-Saxon Old Minster, whose nave of 170 metres (the longest medieval nave in Europe) provides the primary cathedral portrait setting of English Gothic of quite extraordinary spatial scale: the Norman nave arcade’s massive piers, the Gothic retrochoir’s Perpendicular vaulting and the nave triforium’s elevation combine in portrait compositions of medieval English Gothic interior. The Cathedral Close’s medieval precinct wall and the south lawn provide exterior portrait settings. Jane Austen’s memorial in the north nave (she is buried in Winchester, having died on College Street in 1817) provides a specific literary and memorial portrait site.
Winchester College, the Great Hall and the Itchen Meadows
Winchester College — England’s oldest public school, founded 1382 by William of Wykeham with the Flint Court’s fifteenth-century Hall, the medieval Chapel’s fan vault and the Warden’s Lodgings’ courtyard providing a wholly medieval school precinct accessible through guided tours — provides a secondary Winchester portrait setting of medieval collegiate architecture. The Great Hall — the sole survivor of William the Conqueror’s castle, housing the thirteenth-century Round Table of Arthurian legend (the painted Round Table of 1522 or possibly earlier, showing Henry VIII as King Arthur) — provides a medieval hall portrait setting of English royal mythological significance. The Itchen’s chalk stream water meadows along the Nun’s Walk (College Walk’s south bank) provide specific chalk stream water meadow portrait settings of the type celebrated in Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’ written at the water meadows here in 1819.