Preston Wedding Photographer

Getting married in Preston

Preston is the wedding town we drive to most. It is the county town, it has the big country houses on three sides of it, and it has a city centre that most couples never think of photographing until we show them Winckley Square on a quiet Saturday afternoon. If you are looking for a Preston wedding photographer who knows the halls and the parks and the register office on Bow Lane, this page is us talking you through all of it.

The halls first, because that is where most Preston weddings happen. Out to the west, ten minutes from the ring road, is Bartle Hall on Lea Lane: an 18th-century house with a separate Coaching Barn and sixteen acres of woodland, exclusive use every time. You come down the grand staircase into a long aisle behind double doors, and in summer the Pagoda in the grounds is licensed for the ceremony outside. We should say now that Bartle is a no-fly venue for the drone. It sits inside the restricted area round the Springfields site at Salwick, so we never put the drone on a quote there and nobody pays for something we cannot deliver.

East of the city, along the A59 and the A675, are the three that people drive across the county for. Samlesbury Hall is the black-and-white one from 1325, run by a charity, with the ceremony in the Whittaker Room, which used to be the chapel, or in the Great Hall for the bigger weddings. The car park is a quarter of a mile from the door, so you walk up the main drive, and that walk is a photograph in itself. Hoghton Tower is the stone one on the hill, the de Hoghton family home since the 1560s, with the Banqueting Hall for 120 and the Inner Courtyard for an outdoor ceremony with walls on all four sides. Just below it on Quaker Brook Lane is Beeston Manor, a 16th-century barn in pink sandstone with the Oakland Room upstairs for the ceremony and 140 acres of woods round it. Beeston is the one where the drone earns its keep, and the airspace there is clear.

South, past the Capitol Centre and over the Ribble, is Leyland and Farington Lodge on Stanifield Lane, a Georgian brick house in three acres with the Garden Pavilion for outdoor vows and the Jubilee Suite for the evening. It is right by junction 28 of the M6, so your guests from Manchester and the Midlands have an easy run, and the drone can fly there too.

The city itself

The bit of Preston we want more couples to use is the middle. Winckley Square is a Georgian square with gardens in the centre, restored a few years back, two minutes from Fishergate and five from the register office. On a Saturday it is nearly empty. The railings, the plane trees and the long terraces give us a portrait that looks like Bath or Edinburgh, and it costs you ten minutes. From the square a footpath drops straight down into Avenham Park, so we often do both in one walk.

Avenham and Miller Parks are Victorian parks on the slope down to the river, listed as a landscape in their own right. Avenham has the Japanese Garden, the Belvedere on the top path and the big open lawn down to the Ribble. Miller Park, next door, has the formal terrace, the fountain and the Derby statue, with the railway viaduct behind. The parks face south over the river, so they have sun on them for most of the day, and by late afternoon the terrace in Miller Park is in warm side light while the lawn in Avenham is still bright. If your wedding is at the Rose Suite, the parks are a five-minute walk and the obvious place to go while the guests find the cars.

On the Flag Market, the Harris is the Greek Revival building with the big steps and the columns, and the steps are where Preston has always had its photograph taken. The Minster is a short walk away on Church Street, with its spire and churchyard, and if you are marrying there we know where to stand on the path so the whole west front is behind you. The Guild Hall and the Town Hall sit on the other side of the market, so a wedding anywhere in the centre has all of this within a few hundred yards.

How we work a Preston wedding

There are two of us at every wedding, Lee and Dom, which matters more in Preston than most places, because the halls are big and the days are spread out. At Samlesbury, one of us is with the groom and the guests arriving up the drive while the other is upstairs with the bride. At Hoghton, one of us is in the courtyard with the guests while the other does the walk up through the gatehouse. You get both angles of the ceremony, and the speeches get the top table from one side and the faces from the other.

The light in the old halls is the thing we plan round. Samlesbury’s Great Hall is tall and dark-panelled with the windows at the east end, so it is at its best in the morning, and Hoghton’s Banqueting Hall is lit through stained glass that throws colour on faces. Bartle’s house rooms are bright, but the woodland is two or three stops darker than the lawn, so we take you under the trees during the drinks reception rather than leaving it until after the meal. None of that is anything you need to think about. We have already thought about it, and we will tell you when we are nipping out and for how long. Fifteen minutes is usually all we need for the couple portraits, with a second five minutes at sunset if the sky is doing something.

Preston is about twenty miles from our base in Poulton-le-Fylde. Travel is free for the first 10 miles and 50p a mile after that, so the halls east of the city add a little to the quote and Bartle adds almost nothing. Our wedding prices start at £599 for a half day on a weekday, always with both of us. A £100 deposit holds the date. We check the diary and confirm within 24 hours, and you get a sneak peek within 48 hours of the wedding and the full gallery, hand-edited, within six weeks.

Two things that are optional. The drone gives you aerial stills and a short 4K film, about a minute long, flown by Dom, who is a CAA-registered pilot. It is clear at Beeston, Farington and Hoghton, needs a word with the Hall at Samlesbury, and is not possible at Bartle. And Same-Day Prints is a paid add-on of 5, 10 or 25 prints from the morning and the ceremony, edited and printed at the venue and handed over at the wedding breakfast, with the first-dance prints following before the night is over. It goes down very well at the grandparents’ table.