Wedding Photographer Oxfordshire — Blenheim Palace, Oxford’s Spires and the Upper Thames
Oxfordshire is England’s most academically and architecturally distinguished inland county for wedding photography — a county containing the ancient university city of Oxford with its unmatched concentration of medieval collegiate architecture, Blenheim Palace’s Vanbrugh-baroque palace in its Capability Brown landscape park, the upper Thames’ valley of Cotswold stone villages and the Chiltern hills’ beech woodland in the south-east. For Oxfordshire wedding photography, the visual range from Blenheim’s Grand Bridge and the baroque facade to the Bodleian Library’s Radcliffe Camera dome and from the Cotswold stone manor houses of Burford and Burford Priory to the Thames at Oxford’s Christ Church Meadow provides a portrait environment of quite extraordinary architectural and landscape diversity within a single county.
Oxford: the Dreaming Spires, the Radcliffe Camera and the Backs
Oxford’s collegiate architecture — the Radcliffe Camera’s neoclassical drum dome (completed 1749 by James Gibbs), the Bodleian Library’s Gate of Honour and Divinity School, the Sheldonian Theatre and the twenty-odd medieval and early modern college quads — provides a portrait environment of English academic architecture of the greatest possible concentration and variety within a ten-minute walk. Christ Church Meadow — the broad meadow south of Christ Church college between the Thames at Folly Bridge and the Cherwell at the Botanic Garden — provides meadow portrait settings with the college’s Tom Tower visible above the south entrance. The Botanic Garden’s walled enclosure on the Cherwell opposite Magdalen Tower provides a specific riverside scientific garden portrait setting of deep historical significance.
Blenheim Palace, the Cotswold Villages and the Upper Thames
Blenheim Palace — the Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor baroque palace of 1705–2224 in its Capability Brown landscape park at Woodstock, the only non-royal, non-episcopal palace in England and a UNESCO World Heritage Site — provides Oxfordshire’s most monumentally dramatic wedding venue and portrait setting: the Grand Bridge over the lake, the Column of Victory in the park and the baroque south facade above the formal parterre provide portrait compositions of maximum English aristocratic grandeur. The Cotswold stone villages of Burford, Minster Lovell (ruined hall above the Windrush), Kelmscott (William Morris’s manor house above the Thames) and Great Tew’s thatched estate village provide Oxfordshire’s Cotswold portrait landscape of warm limestone and church towers.