Wedding Photographer Ely — the Cathedral City of the Fens and the River Great Ouse
Ely is England’s smallest city — a medieval cathedral town set on a slight rise above the Cambridgeshire fens, visible from miles across the flat landscape as an island of spires and towers emerging from the low country. Its cathedral — the product of continuous building from 1083 to the fifteenth century — contains the celebrated Octagon Tower, a feat of medieval engineering so bold it has been called the wonder of the medieval world, and a nave of 76 metres that is one of the longest in England. As an Ely wedding photographer, I know the cathedral and the city’s immediate surroundings intimately: the Bishop’s Palace garden, the ancient Dean’s Meadow, the riverside walks below the city and the fenland landscape stretching to the horizon in every direction.
The Cathedral, the Bishop’s Palace and the City
Ely Cathedral’s interior — the Romanesque nave, the magnificent Gothic Lady Chapel and the extraordinary Octagon lantern with its eight soaring stone piers — provides ceremony space of the highest European quality for couples who want a mainstream Church of England setting. The cathedral close includes Bishop’s Palace (available for receptions), the medieval almonry and the walled Dean’s Meadow, which provides a formal garden setting immediately adjacent to the cathedral’s north side. The city itself is compact enough to walk entirely in twenty minutes — the market square, the medieval buildings along St Mary’s Street and the high street’s mix of Georgian townhouses and medieval commercial buildings all provide streetscape settings of quiet, intimate historic character.
The River Great Ouse and the Fenland Landscape
The River Great Ouse runs through Ely at the foot of the city mound and provides a sequence of riverside portrait settings from the medieval waterfront at the Quay area east to the nature reserves of the Ely southern fen edge. The rowing clubs on the river, the willow-lined banks above Ely Marina and the old maltings warehouses along the waterfront create a specific river-industrial character that is excellent for couples who want something more characterful than formal garden portraits. The fenland landscape beyond the city provides a different, very distinctive setting: enormous East Anglian sky, straight drains meeting at vanishing points, the cathedral tower visible above the flat horizon — a landscape that is immediately and unmistakably East Anglian in a way impossible to replicate elsewhere.