Gina & Ollie | Temple Church & Spencer House
Temple Church · Spencer House · London
A Documentary Wedding Story
A City of London wedding — vows in the round nave of Temple Church, built by the Knights Templar in 1185, then dinner by candlelight at Spencer House in St James’s.
The Ceremony at Temple Church
Gina wore a Halfpenny London dress and Ollie wore the expression of a man who had checked his watch approximately forty times that morning — something Gina has never let him forget, and which is in this set twice.
They married at Temple Church, which is one of the most extraordinary buildings anyone gets to be married in. It was built by the Knights Templar and consecrated in 1185, and its round nave — one of only four medieval round churches left standing in England — was modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The stone effigies of knights lie on the floor of it. The long chancel beyond was added in 1240. It was gutted by incendiary bombs in 1941 and painstakingly restored afterwards.
It is also shared: Temple Church belongs jointly to Middle Temple and Inner Temple, and it is a royal peculiar, which means it answers to the Crown rather than to a bishop. Practically, that means weddings there are limited and the rules are firm.
Photographically it is a serious room. The chancel is tall and lit from high side windows, the round nave is darker and more enclosed, and flash is out of the question. You expose for what is coming down through the glass, keep to one side, and let a building that has been standing for eight hundred and forty years do the work. Almost nothing else in London looks like it.
Out into the Temple
Out of the church door into the courtyards for drinks, and the best frames of the middle of the day came from the passageways — a bride and groom at the far end of a stone tunnel with light at one end and nothing but shadow between. You do not get that anywhere else in the city.
This is also the part of a wedding day where a documentary approach earns its keep. Nothing was arranged; people simply found each other in a courtyard with a drink in hand, and I stayed out of the way.
If you are considering the Inns of Court, the thing to understand is that they are working legal chambers first and venues second. Access is tightly controlled, the courtyards are shared with people going about their jobs, and there are parts of the estate where you simply cannot set up. None of that is a problem — it just means the photographs come from knowing where the light falls and being ready when two people walk into it, rather than from arranging anything.
Temple Church and the great private houses of St James’s are among the most beautiful places in London to get married, and among the most demanding to photograph — tall, dark, and with strict rules about where a photographer may stand. There is more on how I cover a wedding in the city on the London page.
London wedding photography Venue guidesDinner at Spencer House
Spencer House in St James’s is the finest surviving eighteenth-century private palace in London — built for the first Earl Spencer in the 1750s, and restored in the 1980s to something very close to how it looked when it was new. Painted ceilings, gilding, marble, and rooms that still take your breath away when the doors open.
They took the time to speak to every single guest, which is rarer than it sounds and much harder than it looks. The speeches were emotional and funny in about equal measure.
Almost none of the frames I keep from a set of speeches are of the person speaking. They are of the room: the guest holding it together badly, the friend who knows exactly what is coming next, the whole table turning at once. In a room lit by candles and lamps rather than daylight, that is also where the good light is — on the faces turned towards the speaker.
Gina and Ollie, thank you. A Templar church, an eighteenth-century palace and a groom checking his watch — an honour to photograph, and the two most beautiful buildings I have worked in on the same day.
If you are planning a wedding in the city there is more on London wedding photography, and the venue guides cover the buildings I know best.
Ceremony: Temple Church, Temple, London EC4
Reception: Spencer House, 27 St James’s Place, London SW1
Photography: Oliver Holder
Planning your own Temple Church or City of London wedding? I would love to hear about it.
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