Luisa & Ray | St Anne's Church & Calderstones Mansion House
St Anne’s Church & Calderstones Mansion House
A one o’clock church wedding in Old Swan, an hour in Calderstones Park in the last of the March light, a mansion house in south Liverpool, and a Colombian hora loca that took the roof off. Friday the 27th of March.
The Thing I Was Told Not to Miss
Months before the wedding, Luisa told me there was one part of the day I absolutely could not leave early for. Not the ceremony, not the speeches, not the first dance. The hora loca — the crazy hour. A Colombian tradition where, somewhere late in the evening, the party stops being a wedding reception and becomes something closer to a carnival.
I said yes immediately, and then spent the next few months quietly looking forward to it more than anything else in the diary. It did not disappoint. But we will get to that.
Two Rooms at The Shankly
The morning ran across two rooms at The Shankly Hotel in the middle of Liverpool, which is the sort of logistics problem I actually enjoy. You get two completely different moods within about thirty seconds of walking, and both of them are real.
One room: hair, make-up, family, a dress on the back of a door, and Luisa reading a letter from Ray that she had to stop halfway through. The other: black tie, three brothers-in-arms getting each other straightened out, and Ray’s dad doing the thing every dad does with a bow tie.
A Friday wedding in March gives you a short day and flat northern light, which sounds like a problem and is actually a gift. Nothing is harsh. Everything is even. You can photograph a hotel room at eleven in the morning and it looks like a film set.
One O’Clock, St Anne’s
St Anne’s in Old Swan is a proper Liverpool parish church — stone, columns, high windows and a long aisle that gives you somewhere to work from. Church weddings run differently to town halls. Longer, quieter, more formal, and with a photographer who stays a great deal further back than most people expect.
That distance is the point. From the back of a church with a long lens you get the things nobody has arranged: a page boy losing patience in a pew, a grandmother watching, the exact half second where Ray stopped looking at the vicar and started looking at Luisa coming up the aisle.
Then the walk back down that same aisle at roughly twice the speed, a dress swinging behind her, and a church full of people applauding on both sides.
Then the confetti outside, which was excellent and entirely unmanaged, and a vintage car with a sign in the back window reading Mr & Mrs Chang.
An Hour in Calderstones Park
Luisa and Ray had done something clever with the timings: they left a full hour between leaving the church and being expected at the reception. Not fifteen rushed minutes between other things — an actual hour, deliberately protected, before anybody needed them.
It is the single best planning decision a couple can make, and almost nobody makes it. That hour is where the pictures you hang on a wall come from. We used it in Calderstones Park and around the front of the Mansion House, in late March light that was already going gold by half past three.
The whole group went up the steps for one big frame first, ninety-odd people arranged on a Georgian staircase, and then everybody went inside and left the two of them alone.
An hour of protected couple time is the thing I recommend to every couple I work with, and it is why I suggest a pre wedding shoot too — by the time the day comes, being photographed is not a new experience.
The Mansion House
Calderstones Mansion House sits in the middle of the park, all tall windows and light, and by four o’clock the whole back wall of the room had gone the colour of the sky outside. Cocktail hour at half two, a jazz band, and a meal at four while it was still just about daylight.
Then the speeches, and this is where a wedding tells you what kind of wedding it is. Luisa’s family are Colombian, Ray’s are not, and the room held both at once without anybody having to translate anything. There were speeches that had people in bits and speeches that had the far tables howling, sometimes inside the same minute.
I spend most of a speech with my back to whoever is talking. The person speaking is doing something they rehearsed. Everyone listening is not.
Cake, and the First Dance
The room was turned around at half six — tables out, dance floor in, the whole thing rebuilt around them in half an hour while everybody had a drink somewhere else. Cake by candlelight, and then a first dance in front of a circle of people standing far closer than the couple expected.
And then a pause, which anybody who has been to a Colombian wedding will recognise as the calm before something.
La Hora Loca
Crazy hour is not a metaphor. It is an hour, and it is crazy. The music changes, the volume goes up, and a room of people who have spent all day being politely British at a wedding stop doing that entirely.
Photographically it is the best hour of the whole day and the hardest. There is no light to speak of, everything is moving, and standing still is not an option — you end up in the middle of it with a flash, shooting at shutter speeds slow enough to let the room smear behind whoever you are pointing at. Half of what you take is unusable. The half that is not is unlike anything else in the gallery.
A bottle of Jack Daniel’s went round. A grandmother out-danced most of the room. Ray, who had been perfectly composed all day, was unrecognisable by eleven o’clock. Carriages at midnight, and not a minute before.
Luisa & Ray St Anne’s Church & Calderstones Mansion House, March 2026 · read on Google“Oliver was such a rock and honestly just a superstar at our wedding.”
We obviously loved his overall style of photography and we knew we were gonna get amazing photos, but the things we enjoyed most were just how he interacted with our friends and family during the entire day. He especially made me feel incredibly at ease when beginning and getting ready.
Everyone had so many great things to say about Oliver after the reception and we are just so thankful that it was him that took our photos. We’ve only gotten the previews so far which we absolutely adore, so we can’t wait to get the full gallery when it’s finished. I certainly hope that my husband and I will get another opportunity to have Oliver take any photos of us.
The Team
- Date
- Friday 27 March 2026
- Ceremony
- St Anne’s Church, Cheadle Avenue, Old Swan, Liverpool L13
- Reception
- Calderstones Mansion House, The Reader, Calderstones Park, Liverpool L18
- Getting Ready
- The Shankly Hotel, Victoria Street, Liverpool
- Dress
- Wed2B
- Alterations
- Ange Hollywood, Alterations & Creations
- Suits
- Moss Bros
- Hair
- Hair by Sera R
- Make-up
- Faces by Sarah Webster
- Wedding Car
- George Jones Wedding Cars
- Jazz Band
- The George Hoffman Group
- DJ
- MJDJSAX
- Photo Booth
- Picture Blast
- Video
- Light and Colour / Bara Weddings
- Photography
- Oliver Holder
Luisa and Ray, thank you. For the hour you protected in the park, for a church full of people who actually turned up on a Friday, and for warning me about the hora loca early enough that I could look forward to it. It is one of the best hours I have photographed anywhere.
I am based in Bristol and travel for weddings constantly — every package includes all travel within England and Wales, and Liverpool was very much worth the drive.
More weddings around the country — and a few where a family tradition ran the evening:
T & R | A Surrey Hindu Wedding
Bernie & Naesan | Grantley Hall, Yorkshire
The Worstead Estate, Norfolk
Lauren & Tom | Willow Marsh Farm
A Guernsey Wedding
Jess & Tom | Lyde Court
Date: Friday 27 March 2026
Ceremony: St Anne’s Church, Old Swan, Liverpool
Reception: Calderstones Mansion House, Calderstones Park, Liverpool
Photography: Oliver Holder
Getting married in Liverpool, or anywhere else in the country? I would love to hear about your plans. Every package includes all travel within England and Wales.
Get in Touch View Portfolio View Pricing