Wedding at The Elvetham – Jane and Tony

Elvetham hotel wedding photography

This first image might sum up the weather, for this Hampshire wedding. Rain was in the sky but fortunately this wedding at The Elvetham hotel dodged the any big downpour, despite the dark clouds overhead.

There is a phrase about a couple ‘looking right together’, this has to apply to this bride and groom, Jane and Tony. Just look at the way they look at each other, especially during the wedding ceremony! You can only really capture that when a church lets the photographer stand at the front. Plus the church is nicely lit by daylight.

My reportage wedding photography coverage began with the wedding ceremony at All Saint’s church in Dogmersfield, a pretty mid-Victorian country church. There was a slight delay of thirty minutes, waiting for the bride’s arrival, due to a missing veil but the sun stayed shining on this lovely country church.

The sun still shone later, for the wedding reception at the luxury hotel, The Elvetham – despite the odd ominous looking cloud. The Elvetham is one of Hampshire’s premier hotels. A curious-looking* Victorian mansion – built over an earlier Tudor mansion, it is said – and set in vast grounds of 35 acres. High Victorian Gothic. A real ‘country pile’, yet still not far from London. The busy M3 motorway and Fleet service station is just down the road, but you would not know it, walking around the hotel’s grounds. It’s claimed than Queen Elizabeth I planted one of the oak trees in the grounds.

But the weather held to allow Jane and Tony and their guests, to enjoy the grounds at Elvetham before the wedding breakfast and party inside.

(Oh, and much to the jealousy of two Spurs supporting friends of mine, I got to shake the hand of Ossie Ardilles!)

Here are a few images from the day, that ended at the Elvetham hotel…

* The architectural historian Mark Girouard described Elvetham as “the holiest or unholiest of zebras, being not only striped, but also zigzagged and diapered all over with bricks, and slates of different colours… like an enormous multi-coloured jelly”.