Bartle Hall Wedding Photographer

Why we love photographing at Bartle Hall

If you have booked Bartle Hall and you are looking for a wedding photographer, here is how we would work it. Bartle Hall is two venues on one estate: the Country House, where you get married, and the Coaching Barn further into the woods, where you eat and dance. That walk between the two is the thing to plan around. It is the reason we send two photographers to every wedding here. One of us can be in the barn with your guests while the other is still in the house with you.

The house is 18th century, with a tree-lined drive in from Lea Lane through the gates. That drive is the first photograph of the day and the last. Inside, the bar and lounge is where your guests gather, and the ceremony room sits a few steps away behind a pair of double doors. You come down the grand staircase and along a long aisle. It is a proper entrance, and it needs a photographer at the bottom of the stairs and another at the far end of the aisle to get both the look on your face and the look on everyone else’s.

The barn is a different building altogether: exposed brick, high timber beams, a long bar, a dance floor with a raised stage for the band, and double doors out onto a covered terrace with real flame heaters. Beyond the terrace the gardens are lit by permanent festoon lights and there is a gated patch they call the secret garden. It is the sort of place where the evening photographs look after themselves, as long as somebody is out there with a camera when the lights come on.

Bartle is in Woodplumpton parish, between Preston and Kirkham, just off the M55. We are based at Poulton-le-Fylde, so it is about 25 minutes for us. We cover it under our normal wedding prices, with a full day from £1,049 on a weekday and two photographers as standard. One thing to know before you book anything with a drone: Bartle Hall sits inside the Springfields restricted airspace, so we cannot fly here. More on that below.

Light and timing

The Country House rooms are bright during the day, with big windows onto the gardens, so the ceremony and the morning need no extra light. The woodland is a different matter. Under the trees it is two or three stops darker than the lawn, so we plan the couple portraits there for the drinks reception rather than later. In winter that means straight after the ceremony. The Coaching Barn is dark by design, with warm atmospheric lighting under the beams. We bring off-camera flash for the speeches and the first dance and bounce it off the brick so it still looks like the barn. On a wet day the plan moves to the staircase, the lounges and the covered terrace, which is heated, and the walk between the buildings happens under the umbrellas we bring.

Drone

We cannot fly a drone at Bartle Hall, and nor can anyone else. The hall is inside EGR312, the restricted area around the Springfields nuclear fuel site at Salwick. It is a 2 nautical mile circle from the ground up to 2,100 ft, and the hall is about 2.4 km from the site, well inside it. We will not take a booking for the drone here, so you are not paying for something we cannot deliver. The drive, the woodland and the lawn give us the wide shots from the ground instead. If you want to know how we check airspace at other venues, it is on our drone page.