This one starts at a different wedding. Earlier that summer I was at Erica and Rob's wedding at Langley Castle, a few miles west of here, and the hairstylist working on the bride that morning was Gill. We talked the way you do when you are both working. Somewhere in it she mentioned she was getting married herself, and then she asked whether I would come back up and photograph it.
Being asked by someone who works in weddings is a different sort of ask. Gill knows more photographers than most couples will ever meet, and she picked one from another county and made him drive. I took that as the compliment it was, and I still do.
So Gill and Geoff married at Hexham Registry Office, which is Hexham House, a stone house standing in its own park in the middle of the town.
"Hexham reminded me of a smaller Harrogate, with a bit of York mixed into it."
The VenueWhat Hexham House gives you
- iA restored Grade II* listed house. Not a corridor with a desk in it. Stone front, sash windows, a columned porch and a deep green door, with Hexham Abbey visible from almost every room. Seven self-catering apartments sit on the same site, which quietly solves where everyone sleeps.
- iiTwo rooms, two sizes. The Garden Room takes up to 70 guests and the newer Lounge up to 18, so the building takes a seventy-guest wedding and a very small one without either feeling wrong. Gill and Geoff's ceremony room was gold chairs on blue seat pads, a blue runner down the middle and cream flowers at the table where they signed.
- iiiThe garden is a registered historic park. The old gardens of Abbey House, Hexham House and Sele House were joined into one set of public parks, listed Grade II on the national Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. There is a bandstand in it and an avenue of beech that in November goes completely gold, with festoon lights strung between the trunks.
- ivThe abbey is five minutes on foot. I know it is five minutes because my own timestamps say so: the abbey wall at 14:33, back at the porch of the house at 14:38, and no running involved. The church itself is mostly 1170 to 1250. Full venue details are on the Northumberland ceremonies page for Hexham House.
Gill & Geoff, 13 November 2024Five places, five minutes apart
Everything on this page happened between ten to two and half past four, and the last frame of the day was made in the dark. It never felt rushed, because nothing was more than a short walk from the front door. Here is where the pictures are.
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The front of the house 13:50
The first frame of the day is the building with nobody in front of it. Ivy up one side, the lawn cut, the whole of Hexham House sitting in its own park in the middle of a market town. Nobody hires a wedding photographer to photograph a building. I do it anyway, because it is the frame that tells you what the place actually is.
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The archway 14:28
A stone arch over the street, the two of them stood dead centre underneath it with the town beyond, and one lamp on the wall doing more work than it should. Wide lens, both of them small in the frame. Not everything has to be a close-up.
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The abbey wall 14:33
Five minutes later, leant into the stone with Hexham Abbey behind them and its tall gothic windows going up out of the top of the picture. Old buildings flatter people. Standing next to one that has been there since the twelfth century does something to how a photograph reads.
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The porch and the green door 14:38, then 15:20 onwards
The porch does a lot of work. Columns either side, a green door in the middle, stone in every direction and enough overhang to keep the rain off. I shot it three ways: the pair of them small inside it, tight against the door, and one each side of it holding hands across the front.
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The park 15:33 to 15:39
Out of the gate into the beeches. Leaves down, more still gold overhead, festoon lights strung across the path, and a cast-iron bandstand at the end of it. This is the ten minutes that makes a registry office wedding look like a wedding, and it is over the road.
The ceremony room itself is plain in the way that suits a small wedding: pale walls, one framed picture, doors that open straight out towards the light. They signed the register at a wooden table with two large cream and white arrangements either side of it, then stood in the open doorway at the end of the blue runner while everyone got their phones out. Gill wore a knee-length white lace dress with flowers set into her hair. Geoff wore navy and a pale blue tie. Between them they had one of the least complicated wedding days I have photographed, and I would happily do another one here tomorrow.
"The ceremony is the short bit. What decides whether a registry office wedding looks like anything is what sits within five minutes of the door, and Hexham House has more inside five minutes than a lot of country houses have inside their gates."
Two WeddingsWhere this one came from
Hexham Registry Office is a long way outside my patch. Northumberland is not somewhere I go looking for work, and I am not pretending otherwise on this page. I drove up because Gill asked me to, and because of where she asked.
The two days belong together. At Langley Castle she was the one making somebody else look right on the morning of their wedding, quietly, in a room nobody photographs. A few months later she was the one in the lace dress in the porch at Hexham House. Read that one and then this one and it is a single story with two halves.
Credit Where It Is DueGill's own work
Gill is a hairstylist working across Northumberland, and her own site is here. If you are getting married up that way, she is the one I would ring.
