Real Wedding: Emma & James at King's College Chapel, Cambridge

Their Story

Emma and James met in their second year of graduate study at Cambridge — both reading for PhDs, both spending too many evenings in the same corner of the University Library. James says he noticed Emma first; Emma says she noticed him noticing her. Either way, by the end of that Michaelmas term they had stopped working and started talking, and by the time their vivas came around three years later, they were already planning a wedding in the city that had brought them together.

There was never any real debate about the venue. King's College Chapel had been a fixture of their student years — concerts, evensongs, the small acts of beauty that punctuate a long doctorate — and the idea of being married there, in candlelight, with the late afternoon September sun coming through the stained glass, felt inevitable rather than ambitious.

The morning was unhurried. Emma got ready at the Varsity Hotel with her mother and two sisters, the windows open over the Cam and the city's bells marking the hours. The dress — a beaded lace gown with long sleeves and a soft chapel train — had been chosen at a small boutique in Marylebone almost a year earlier; her mother's veil, lent for the day, completed it.

The ceremony itself was scheduled for four o'clock — late enough for the chapel's interior to settle into amber, early enough for an evening of light afterwards. Eighty guests filled the choir stalls. The chapel choir sang. Vows were exchanged in a hush so complete you could hear the candles flickering. James said later it was the calmest forty minutes of his life; Emma said it was the fastest.

Afterwards, instead of going straight into the reception, the couple slipped away for half an hour on the river. A punt had been arranged by James's best man, and the two of them poled — badly, laughing — up to the Mathematical Bridge and back, while the rest of the wedding party drank champagne on the Backs. It is the half-hour Emma now says she remembers most clearly: not the ceremony, not the dancing, but the quiet of the Cam and the unfamiliar feeling of being newly married with no one watching.

The reception was held at the Fitzwilliam Museum — long tables, low candlelight, cream and sage florals running the length of the room, the museum's permanent collection looking on. Speeches from both fathers and from Emma's older sister were genuinely funny and properly moving in roughly equal measure. The Silver Lyre, a five-piece string and brass band, played through dinner before switching to dancing music for the evening.

By eleven the dance floor was full and barely emptied for the next two hours. The cake — three tiers of vanilla sponge with pressed edible flowers — was cut just before the band's last set. At a quarter to midnight, eighty guests lined the museum's front steps with sparklers, and Emma and James walked through them and out into the cool September night, the lights of King's just visible at the end of Trumpington Street.

It was the kind of wedding that didn't try to be a particular thing — it simply was the people having it, in the city that had made them. That, I think, is always when the photographs find themselves.