Why Staffordshire is a brilliant county to photograph a wedding in
Staffordshire is easy to underestimate, and completely wrong to. The county stretches from the edge of Birmingham’s suburbs all the way up to the gritstone moors of the Peak District, and in between you’ll find some of the most beautiful and characterful wedding venues in the Midlands.
The grandeur of Sandon Hall — a genuine aristocratic estate — lends itself perfectly to documentary photography, where the architecture becomes part of the story. Keele Hall in Newcastle-under-Lyme has that same quality: the kind of setting where the building itself is a character. Shugborough Estate, the old ancestral home of the Earls of Lichfield, gives a wedding an extraordinary sense of place.
Further north, the Staffordshire Moorlands and the fringes of the Peak District open up something altogether wilder. Barn venues like Alcumlow (just over the Cheshire border but a firm Staffordshire-area favourite) and Coton House Farm suit a documentary approach brilliantly — the landscape earns its place in the pictures.
In the south of the county, venues around Lichfield and Tamworth tend to draw couples who want something a little more intimate and rooted. Whatever the setting, I find the story.
