Sometimes the tube in central London can be your best friend on a wedding day. Unless there is a strike of course! On Zoe and Peter’s special day a great many streets were closed on both sides of the river Thames for a no car zone event.
Zoe was getting ready at the Caledonian Club in London’s Belgravia, then travelling to her wedding ceremony at Our Lady of Czestochowa and Saint Casimir in Islington, then back to her wedding reception at the Caledonian. She would be doing all of this in a lovely Rolls Royce hired for the day, but we figured we could beat her and groom Peter over time if we hopped on the tube at Hyde Park corner to Angel station.
Well after capturing Zoe, her bridesmaids and families preparations at the Belgravia club we literally ran to the station nearby and then through the streets of Islington to the church when we arrived. We like to think of it as a bonus wedding photography aerobic exercise for ourselves!
This meant we had plenty of time to document Peter’s groomsmen family and friends at the lovely church Our Lady of Czestochowa and Saint Casimir, while Zoe made her way slowly but surely through the central London traffic. We advised Zoe to set off early, so in reality everything pretty much ran on time, which was nice. The wedding ceremony itself was conducted with real verve, which can make a big difference to the enduring memories of a wedding having an enthusiastic member of the clergy in charge of your day.
After confetti throwing it was back to our run with cameras and bags on the tube again, to make sure we arrived back at Belgravia and the Caledonian Club for the couple’s big arrival. Drinks and canopies followed for all the guests, and we managed to get some time to go to nearby Belgravia Square to do some family and couple shots.
As the club has a distinctly Scottish heritage, as does Zoe’s family, a fantastic bagpipe player was on hand to lead the couple inside, and also to the cutting of their wedding cake at the foot of the clubs’ imposing staircase.
After good eating and much merriment came speeches from the father of the bride, Peter himself and brother David as best man.
I met the wedding band earlier in the day, a great outfit called The Superlatives. After the couple’s first dance the band were there to make sure the party grooved along in earnest.
Here’s what Zoe and Peter had to say in an email once they received their images:
“Hi David & Joanna, we arrived back from honeymoon today to find our wedding photographs in the post. They are absolutely fantastic and we are blown away by them. We have no idea how we are going to choose just 40 out of over 1000! Thank you so much for capturing our special day so brilliantly. Regards, Zoë & Pete.”
Read about another recent Belgravia and Knightsbridge London wedding on the blog here: London Mandarin Oriental Wedding Photography
For information on the Caledonian Club visit their official site here: London Caledonian Club
By David Green
As part of this change in the industry was the rise of the dedicated wedding blog, not run by photographers, but by people with an interest in all things wedding, and/or entrepreneurs who realised this was a commercially viable area to blog and advertise services in. Now in the UK the most powerful and popular of these seems to be at the time of writing, Rock My Wedding or RMW as it is sometimes referred to, and rightly so. It has high standards, is innovative, and always on the cutting edge of current and high quality wedding photographers and all other related suppliers in the industry.
