FIFTEEN YEARS, SIX POSTCODES AND A LOT OF WEDDINGS: HOW TO PICK YOUR CORNER OF LONDON
I've lived in London for fifteen years, and in that time I've moved 7 times. Every move taught me something about this city that I couldn't have learned any other way - mostly that London isn't one place. It's about forty places wearing a trench coat, and the walk between two of them can take you from Georgian stucco to a tyre shop in about ninety seconds.
That matters more than people think when you're planning a wedding here. Because you're not just picking a venue. You're picking a *mood*, and it'll be in every photograph you look at for the next fifty years.
So here's what I've learned, mostly by living it.
Central London: expensive, crowded, but worth every penny because of the iconic backdrop.
Marylebone, Mayfair, Belgravia, Fitzrovia. The postcards. Yes it's expensive and yes you'll be sharing the pavement with a walking tour - but nowhere else on earth gives you those backdrops, and they're in every frame for free.
I have never lived in Central London and don't know many people who have for obvious reasons.... But as every Londoner I still think the walk down Marylebone High Street on a Saturday morning is one of the great small pleasures of this city.
I've shot at Marylebone Registry Office more times than anywhere else in London, and I'll never get bored of it. There's something about that building - the steps, the way couples come out slightly stunned, the confetti that gets everywhere. And then you're two minutes from Portman Square, five from a mews that looks like a film set, ten from Regent's Park if the light's doing something good.
What central gives you:
- Architecture that does half the work for you
- Portrait backdrops within a five-minute walk of basically anywhere
- Guests can actually get there, from anywhere
- That slightly formal, film-still quality - Georgian doorways, black cabs, wet pavement
Where everyone goes afterwards
The genius of Marylebone is that you can do the whole day on foot. Some of my favourites within a short walk of the Town Hall steps:
- **The Royal Oak** - literally around the corner, been there since 1807, and they don't charge a wedding premium. The one I recommend most often.
- **The Grazing Goat** - near Marble Arch, hire the top room, feels like a proper London pub rather than a function space.
- **Sir John Balcombe** - tucked behind Dorset Square, good food, private spaces, and quiet enough that you can hear the speeches.
- **The Landmark London** - directly across the road, enormous glass atrium, for when you want the grand version.
- **41 Portland Place** - Georgian townhouse with outdoor space, which is rarer than it sounds around here.
- **St Mary's Marylebone** - a beautiful Georgian hall if you've got a bigger crowd.
- **Regent's Park** - you can hire space inside the park itself, and you're already going there for photos anyway.
And the walking route between the Town Hall and most of these is genuinely good for pictures. Salisbury Place, the mews off Marylebone High Street, the columns on the Town Hall portico when the light comes in sideways at four o'clock.
The honest downside is cost, and the fact that central London on a Saturday is *busy*. I've directed couples around tourists, roadworks, hen parties and a man dressed as a Yeoman Warder. It's fine - I know where the quiet corners are now. That's what fifteen years buys you.
One of my favourite frames from last year is a couple outside the Moulin Rouge marquee in the West End, her dress mid-spin, the whole theatre glowing red behind them. That photo doesn't exist anywhere else on earth. That's what central London is for.
East London: where the wedding stops behaving
Then there's the other London. I lived in Bethnal Green, Hackney, Homerton, Islington, Leytonstone many many years (I'm an East London girl at heart) and it changed how I shoot.
East London weddings tend to be the ones where somebody's mate is doing the flowers, the food is genuinely excellent, and the dancing starts embarrassingly early. Warehouses in Hackney Wick. Pub function rooms on Mare Street. Hackney Town Hall, which is a genuinely stunning art deco building that half the people who live there don't know about.
I photographed a couple outside the Hackney Empire last summer - pink shoes, short dress, a huge gold banner above them reading LET'S DREAM BIG. Nobody planned that. It's just what was there that day. That's East London: the backdrop keeps giving you things you didn't ask for.
What you get out here:
- Spaces you can actually make your own
- Street texture - brick, neon, graffiti, the good kind of mess
- Food and drink that isn't a set menu
- An atmosphere that gives people permission to relax
The ones worth looking at
- **Hackney Town Hall** - art deco, gorgeous, and one of the best registry offices in London. Mare Street, so you're right in the middle of everything afterwards.
- **Studio 9294** - Hackney Wick, warehouse with high ceilings and a courtyard for drinks. The classic East London blank canvas.
- **The Hackney** - a converted 1856 brewery on Hackney Road, exclusive hire, everything in-house. Sixty seated, so it's for the intimate end.
- **Village Underground** - railway arches in Shoreditch, stripped back, and the lighting is properly customisable. Good for the ones who want a party.
- **Clapton Country Club** - urban-industrial with a shabby, warm edge. Somehow feels rural despite being in E5.
- **Hoxton Arches** - small, characterful, relaxed. Easy to make your own.
- **Town Hall Hotel, Bethnal Green** - for when you want East London but with marble.
And the streets around all of these are the point. Mare Street, the canal at Hackney Wick, the graffiti on Fish Island, the pub doorways with the good signage. I've photographed a couple against a smoking sign in a pub window on Mare Street and it's one of my favourite frames of the year.
If you're the kind of couple who wants your wedding to feel like a really good party that happens to have vows in it, this is your bit of London.
The parts nobody mentions
South London is quietly having a moment. I've shot in Peckham, Brixton, Greenwich, and there's a looseness down there that suits couples who don't want to perform. Rooftops, proper pubs, the river.
North London gives you Highgate, Hampstead Heath and some of the best green space in the city - genuinely the closest you'll get to a countryside wedding without leaving zone 3. It is my personal favourite part of London now and having a taste of the country made me fully commit and leave London for Sussex.
And then there's the stuff that isn't in any neighbourhood guide. The National Covid Memorial Wall by the river, thousands of hand-painted hearts, which I photographed a couple in front of and haven't stopped thinking about since. A red phone box on an ordinary grey afternoon in Westminster that had no business looking as good as it did.
Those frames don't come from a venue list. They come from having walked these streets for fifteen years and knowing what happens to them at seven in the evening in September.
So how do you actually choose?
Forget the venue for a minute and answer this instead: **what do you want the photographs to feel like?**
If the answer is elegant, timeless, a bit cinematic in an old-Hollywood way - go central. If it's warm, loud, a bit chaotic, full of people you love - go east. If it's green and quiet and you want to be able to hear each other - go north.
Then work backwards to the venue. It's a better order.
The other thing worth thinking about: where do *you* actually spend time? Some of the best weddings I've shot have happened in the couple's own neighbourhood. The pub they had their first date in. The park they walk through every Sunday. There's a warmth in those photos that you can't buy from a grander venue, because the place already means something.
What this has to do with hiring a photographer
Honestly? Local knowledge is the least glamorous thing on my website and one of the most useful things I bring.
Knowing that the light hits the Marylebone steps beautifully at half four in October. Knowing which side street off Mare Street is quiet when the venue garden is heaving. Knowing that the walk from your ceremony to your reception is eleven minutes, not "about twenty," and that we can take the long way and get four brilliant frames on the route.
That's not a style. That's just having lived here.
My work is documentary for most of the day - I'm around, and you'll forget about me. When it's time for portraits I'll direct you properly, tell you exactly what to do, and it takes about twenty minutes. The London bit is what happens in between: knowing where to take you, and when.
Come and tell me about your bit of London
Whatever corner you've picked - the townhouse in Marylebone, the warehouse in Hackney Wick, the pub on your street with the good beer garden - I'd love to hear about it.
