Wedding Photographer Windsor — Windsor Castle, the Long Walk and Windsor Great Park
Windsor is England’s most spectacular and most historically significant royal town — a Thames-side settlement whose entire townscape is dominated by Windsor Castle’s 1,000-year continuous royal residence (the world’s largest inhabited castle, 52,000 square metres, originally built by William the Conqueror c.1070 and continuously developed to the present), with the Long Walk’s 4.8-kilometre triple elm and chestnut allée through Windsor Great Park connecting the George IV Gateway to the Copper Horse’s equestrian statue of George III on Snow Hill above Bishopsgate. For Windsor wedding photography, the combination of the Horseshoe Cloister’s medieval almshouses, the Long Walk’s grand royal allée and the 5,000-acre Great Park’s valley garden and savannah provide portrait settings of English royal landscape of the most magnificent and most publicly celebrated type.
Windsor Castle, the Horseshoe Cloister and St George’s Chapel
Windsor Castle’s exterior — the Round Tower’s Norman keep above the chalk mound of William’s original motte, the Lower Ward’s medieval street of the Horseshoe Cloister’s medieval almshouses and St George’s Chapel’s Perpendicular Gothic facades — provides portrait settings of English royal medieval castle architecture visible from the two accessible public approach routes: the Long Walk from the park and the High Street’s steep approach to the Castle Hill entrance. The Garter ceremony’s Horseguards’ approach through the Lower Ward (visible publicly in June) provides the primary processional portrait context. St George’s Chapel’s Perpendicular exterior — the late fifteenth-century chapel of the Order of the Garter — provides a Gothic chapel portrait setting.
The Long Walk, Windsor Great Park and the Valley Garden
The Long Walk — the 4.8-kilometre straight allée of plane trees and sweet chestnuts planted by Charles II c.1680 running south from the George IV Gateway to the Copper Horse on Snow Hill above Bishopsgate — provides England’s most magnificent royal allée portrait setting: the avenue’s converging double lines of trees, the castle visible at one end and the equestrian statue at the other, and the mown grass between the avenue lines provide portrait compositions of English royal landscape grand-axis character. Windsor Great Park’s Valley Garden — the 250-acre garden with the Punch Bowl’s 65-acre heather garden and the oak and beech collection — provides a garden portrait destination within the park.