J & S | Claridge's & Fortnum & Mason
Claridge’s · Fortnum & Mason · London
A Documentary Wedding Story
A Mayfair morning at Claridge’s, a black cab across town, and a wedding inside Fortnum & Mason on Piccadilly — where shoppers four floors up dropped flower petals down the spiral staircase onto the newlyweds.
The Morning at Claridge’s
They got ready at Claridge’s, which is a building that does a great deal of the work for you. The art deco lobby, the mirrored hallways, the chequerboard marble — every one of those surfaces throws light back at you, and a hotel of that vintage has windows tall enough that you never need to reach for anything artificial.
The entrance down the main staircase was the moment of the morning. She made sure of it, and he looked like a man who had temporarily forgotten how to speak.
Out onto Brook Street
A few frames under the Claridge’s canopy on Brook Street, then into a black cab and east through Mayfair. There is something about a bride in a London taxi that never stops being good — the whole city carrying on outside the window, entirely unaware.
Fortnum & Mason, Piccadilly
Fortnum & Mason has been on Piccadilly since 1707, which makes it older than most of the buildings around it and a genuinely strange place to hold a wedding. It began as a grocer’s founded by a footman of Queen Anne’s household and a local shopkeeper, and the store you walk into today still runs on that logic: eau-de-nil everywhere, hampers stacked to the ceiling, and a spiral staircase running up through the middle of the whole building.
Walking into a working London department store in a wedding dress on a normal trading afternoon is a surreal thing to photograph. Customers stop. Staff smile. And the light coming through those tall arcaded windows onto pale green walls is about as flattering as interior light gets in this country.
A Mayfair hotel, a black cab and a wedding inside one of the oldest shops in London is about as good as a city wedding gets — and it works because everything is within twenty minutes of everything else. There is more on how I cover a day like this on the London page, and the micro weddings page covers smaller celebrations of exactly this shape.
London wedding photography Micro weddings Venue guidesConfetti on the Spiral Staircase
And then the best confetti moment I have photographed. As they came down the spiral staircase, customers in the store above were handed flower petals and invited to drop them over the rail. Four floors of strangers throwing petals down a spiral stairwell onto two people who had just got married. It was completely magical, and I have not seen anything like it before or since.
Technically it is a nightmare and a gift at the same time: you are shooting up into a bright atrium, or down into a dark one, with petals falling through the frame and roughly four seconds to work with. You pick one and commit.
Speeches and a Grazing Table
The speeches were warm and short, the grazing station was the size of a small county, and the screen carried a photograph captioned exactly one year ago today, which explains rather a lot about how long this day had been waited for.
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 and is already going, the mother reaching for a napkin, the table at the back that has entirely lost its composure. If you want to know what a wedding actually felt like, look at the audience.
The Party
And then it went off. Cocktails, a floor that filled early and never emptied, and a couple who danced with absolutely everybody in the room.
A wedding in central London does not have to mean a hotel ballroom. Between the register offices, the livery halls, the museums, the department stores and the private rooms above very good pubs, there is a version of a city wedding for almost every size of guest list — and the ones that use two or three buildings in an afternoon almost always photograph better than the ones that stay put, because the journey between them is where people relax.
J and S, thank you. An art deco hotel, a 300-year-old grocer’s and a stairwell full of falling petals — a London wedding that could not have happened anywhere else.
If you are planning something in the city there is more on London wedding photography and on micro weddings.
Preparations: Claridge’s, Brook Street, Mayfair, London W1
Reception: Fortnum & Mason, 181 Piccadilly, London W1
Photography: Oliver Holder
Planning your own Fortnum & Mason or central London wedding? I would love to hear about it.
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