Wedding Photographer York — the Minster, the Shambles, the City Walls and the Yorkshire Museum Gardens
York is England’s best-preserved medieval walled city and one of its most historically layered — a city of Roman Eboracum’s street grid, Viking Hólþrvík’s Coppergate and the Norman Minster’s medieval cathedral on the scale of a French Gothic cathedral, all enclosed within the Roman and medieval city walls’ snaking circuit of 13th-century stone and earthwork. For York wedding photography, the city’s medieval portrait landscape provides extraordinary portrait density: York Minster’s Central Tower’s Gothic interior, the Shambles’ overhanging medieval butchers’ row, the city walls’ Walmgate Bar’s medieval city gate, the Georgian Mansion House and the Yorkshire Museum Gardens’ Roman and medieval ruins together within the medieval circuit create portrait settings of English urban history of the most concentrated single-city type anywhere in Britain.
York Minster, the Central Tower and the Chapter House
York Minster — the Gothic cathedral of the Archbishop of York, one of the largest medieval Gothic cathedrals in Northern Europe (one of the largest Gothic buildings in Northern Europe), with the Central Tower’s 71-metre height visible thirty miles across the Vale of York, the nave’s fourteenth-century Great West Window (‘the Heart of Yorkshire’) and the Chapter House’s thirteenth-century sculpture programme — provides a Gothic cathedral portrait setting of considerable Northern English ecclesiastical grandeur. The Minster’s south transept’s Rose Window’s 2.7-metre fifteenth-century glass array and the Dean’s Park’s north facade lawns provide exterior portrait settings.
The Shambles, the City Walls and the Yorkshire Museum Gardens
The Shambles — York’s medieval butchers’ row of fifteenth and sixteenth-century overhanging timber-framed houses, with the upper storeys’ jettied overhang narrowing the lane’s width to less than two-and-a-half metres in places and the hanging meat-boards’ hooks still visible above the present shop fronts — provides the most celebrated and most photographically distinctive medieval English commercial street portrait setting: the converging timber frames’ perspective, the warm York cream magnesian limestone and the sense of medieval market town urban density. The Yorkshire Museum Gardens’ ruined St Mary’s Abbey arcade — the thirteenth-century abbey ruins above the garden’s riverside lawn — provide Gothic ruin portrait settings. The city walls’ Walmgate Bar’s barbican provides the only surviving medieval gate barbican in England.