Having just booked two weddings for West Lodge Park hotel in Cockfosters in the past week, it got us reminiscing about all the lovely wedding days we have photographed there over the past ten years.
These days though we may just work there once or twice a year, as it seems we are more likely for some reason to get booked for Pembroke Lodge in Richmond! But this Hertfordshire gem just outside the suburb of Cockfosters, is literally just round the corner from where we actually live. In fact it was here that we photographed some of our earliest weddings and built upon our signature styles and approaches.
I took a look back over various sets of images and was literally bamboozled at the amount and choice we could use in a blog post. To this end we will start with a few favourites and add to them over time, as right now we are already busy with wedding meetings and the real start to our season at the beginning of this February.
What we really like about West Lodge is the variety of locations available there. You have the distinctive white painted main house and some lovely Georgian interiors to begin with. Then there are the grounds which have a real mixture of mature trees and open spaces, a lake with weeping willows, and one of our favourite areas at the back end of the gardens is the memorial with lovely pillars. The whole place is also famous for it’s variety of plants.
West Lodge Park is now a four star rated hotel with a rich history. It is thought to have first appear in the 1400s as one of three lodges built to stop poaching and the felling of trees in the Enfield Chase area. By the 1660s the secretary of state to Charles the second was living there. And over the centuries it has been a prestigious country home to many, and by 1924 it had become a high end hotel. Since 1945 to the present day it has been run by the Beale family to fantastic standards of quality and hospitality. Wedding wise there are no less than nine separate rooms or spaces that you can get married in, and we have photographed in them all! There are even provisions for a marquee in the gardens should your wedding party be on the larger side.
Some of the images here show bridal prep times in the various suites available at the hotel. Others feature one our favourite wedding days here with the very famous Kerry laughing in the rain, and then when the downpour subsided having some images taken around the Beale memorial.
Now we mentioned Pembroke Lodge at the beginning of this post because it really does remind us of West Lodge Park, with one or two fundamental differences. Both are famous in their own way, but one is north London and the other south. The advantage that West Lodge has is that it is in private grounds whereas Pembroke is not. Anyway you can read about our seperate experiences there on this previous post on the blog: Pembroke Lodge Weddings
To see more images for West Lodge Park, take look at galleries one two and three either on the menu tab above or instantly here: Wedding Galleries
By David Green
