Wedding Photographer Woking — the Basingstoke Canal, the Surrey Hills and the Hog’s Back
Woking is Surrey’s largest town and a central hub for its surrounding landscape of remarkable ecological and topographical variety — a town positioned at the junction of the North Downs’ chalk escarpment to the south, the Basingstoke Canal’s restored Regency waterway and the Surrey heaths of Horsell Common (the landing site of H.G. Wells’s Martians in The War of the Worlds) and Chobham Common’s National Nature Reserve to the north. For Woking wedding photography, the surrounding landscape’s variety provides portrait settings of Surrey heath, canal towpath, chalk downland and Surrey Hills country within an easy portrait day: Painshill Park’s eighteenth-century landscape garden at Cobham, the Hog’s Back’s chalk ridge above Guildford and the Basingstoke Canal’s towpath at Pyrford Lock.
The Basingstoke Canal, Pyrford Lock and the Surrey Waterway
The Basingstoke Canal — the Regency commercial canal of 1794 running 51 miles from the River Wey at New Haw through Woking to Greywell Tunnel near Basingstoke, now a restored amenity waterway of SSSI-designated ecology (one of England’s most biodiverse canals, with the rare floating-leaved aquatic plants in the Greywell and Dogmersfield reaches) — provides a waterway portrait setting of considerable Surrey rural character: the Pyrford Lock’s wooden lock gates, the towpath’s overhanging willows and the canal’s reflective surface in calm conditions. The Wey Navigation’s Papercourt Lock at Send provides a further waterway portrait setting.
Painshill Park, the Hog’s Back and the Surrey Hills
Painshill Park — the eighteenth-century landscape garden at Cobham, created by Charles Hamilton 1738–73, with the serpentine lake, the Gothic Temple, the Ruined Abbey and the Crystal Grotto’s mirror-sparkling cave interior — provides one of the South East’s finest and least-visited eighteenth-century landscape garden portrait settings within fifteen minutes of Woking. The Hog’s Back — the narrow chalk ridge of the North Downs running west from Guildford above the A31, with panoramic views north to London’s glass towers and south to the Sussex Weald — provides a ridge-top portrait setting. Box Hill and Leith Hill are accessible in thirty minutes from the town.