Jordan & Anna | The Barbican Conservatory
The Barbican Conservatory · City of London
A Documentary Wedding Story
A wedding in the Barbican Conservatory — two thousand species of plant under glass, a ceremony led by a close friend, and portraits on the most photogenic concrete in London.
The Morning, and a Trip to Pret
Anna spent the morning with her closest friends, and one of my favourite moments of the whole day happened before anything official had started: two of the bridesmaids announced they were going out for supplies, so naturally I went with them. There is a photograph in this set of a wedding party buying sandwiches, and I would not trade it for anything on the timeline.
This wedding had also been postponed once already, which is worth saying out loud. A lot of the weddings I photographed in this period had been moved twice, rebooked, cut down and rebuilt, and you could feel the difference in the room when they finally happened.
The Barbican Conservatory
The Conservatory is the second largest in London after Kew, and almost nobody knows it is there. It sits on top of the Barbican’s fly tower — the theatre’s scenery store — and holds around two thousand species of plant under a great glazed roof. Concrete below, jungle above. It is one of the strangest and best rooms in the city.
What it gives you photographically is overhead daylight through glass, filtered green by the planting, falling on raw board-marked concrete. That is an unusual combination: soft light and hard surfaces at the same time. You can photograph a whole ceremony in there without a single flash, and the background changes completely every three paces because of the planting.
The Barbican Conservatory is one of the most distinctive wedding venues in London and one of the few where the building alone will carry the photographs. It is also dark in places and very bright in others, so it rewards a photographer who has been in there before. There is more on how I cover a city wedding on the London page.
London wedding photography Venue guidesThe Ceremony
The ceremony was led by one of the couple’s close friends, which almost always makes for a better one — it is personal, it is funny in the right places, and it does not sound like it has been read out four hundred times before. There were tears well before the vows.
One practical note if you are considering it: the Conservatory is only open to the public on limited days, and a wedding there is a hire rather than a slot, so the room is yours. That means no strangers in the background of your ceremony photographs, which is rarer in central London than you would think. It also means the aisle is narrow and planted on both sides, so a photographer needs to work from one side and stay there rather than moving around behind the guests.
Among the Planting, and Out onto the Concrete
Twenty minutes with Jordan and Anna afterwards: first among the ferns and palms in the Conservatory itself, then out onto the terraces and walkways where the Barbican is at its most uncompromising — curved balconies, board-marked concrete and those long, repeating horizontals.
Very few venues let you move between a rainforest and a Grade II listed brutalist masterpiece in under a minute. It is why the Barbican is such a good choice for couples who want their photographs to look like nowhere else.
Dinner and the Speeches
The speeches ran the full range — genuinely funny, then quietly devastating, then funny again. Jordan took his jacket off halfway through his, which is always the sign of a man committing.
Almost none of the frames I keep from a set of speeches are of the person speaking. They are of the room: the friend who has heard the story before, the guest holding it together badly, the table at the back that has gone completely.
The Party
First dance, then coloured light and a floor that stayed full. After a wedding that had already been postponed once, nobody was in any hurry to leave.
Coloured uplighting is the one thing that genuinely changes how an evening photographs. Purple and magenta will do strange things to skin tones if you leave a camera to its own devices, so the answer is to stop fighting it — let the colour be the picture, and use black and white for the frames where the moment matters more than the light. Half of this set is monochrome for exactly that reason.
Jordan and Anna, thank you. A sandwich run, a jungle on top of a theatre, and a party that had waited long enough — worth every postponement.
If you are planning a wedding in the city there is more on London wedding photography, and the venue guides cover the buildings I photograph most often.
Ceremony & reception: The Conservatory, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC2
Photography: Oliver Holder
Planning your own Barbican or London wedding? I would love to hear about it.
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