Harris Manchester College wedding

An Oxford wedding for Laura and Matt – on a warm summer’s day last Saturday.

Laura got ready with her bridesmaids, sister and her mother, in the Old Bank Hotel on the High Street in Oxford. Outside the clouds began to slowly thin out during the morning and blue sky made a welcome appearance. As the preps went on, so the inevitable nerves for Laura began to grow. For every bride, the nerves grow during this part of the day. The wedding dress pretty much on, I left to walk the short route to the ceremony venue, the chapel at Harris Manchester College. It’s only five minutes or so away. A ceremony set for 12.30. There, at Laura’s old college, Matt was greeting friends and family and hoping Laura was maybe a few minutes late! The reason, something had got left behind and there was a mad dash back to the pub outside of Oxford in progress in a fast car. You can probably guess what it was from an image below.

The vintage Routemaster bus was in place, parked outside the college, ready to take the guests to the reception venue, just outside Oxford. We waited….and waited in the sunshine. Laura was late, half an hour late when the vintage wedding cars finally appeared on Mansfield Street. Now if you were driving south on the M40 last Saturday afternoon, a blur may have passed you ‘at speed’. It may well have been the cleric who performed this wedding ceremony. The Rev Canon John Ovenden, Dean of Chapel and Chaplain at the college and formerly Canon of St George’s Chapel at Windsor. He had another wedding in a gig in Windsor at 3.30! Nice guy – a photographer-friendly sort of clergy, although the chapel could do with some more lights! 😉

Kirtlington Park wedding reception

Some hugs and smiles outside the chapel and then off to one of my favourite Oxfordshire wedding venues, Kirtlington park. A lovely Grade 1 listed 18th century, Palladian country house, Kirtlington Park, just north of Oxford. I shot my first wedding here in 2007 and it’s been a couple of years since the last. I’m in Sussex but if I was based in Oxfordshire, I’d be happy to shoot here most weeks. It’s not perfect, no venue is, but it’s real!  It’s a home, it has a lived-in appeal, those imperfections are central to its charm. Long may it escape the clutches of some multi-national hotel chain, who will suck the charm right out of it. I could name a few such venues…

Drinks on the lawn, the wedding breakfast, some emotional speeches and then more drinks in the fading sunshine. Not forgetting some dancing…

Here are a few images from a lovely summer Oxford wedding at Harris Manchester College and Kirtlington Park…