Getting ready in Hastings

Alice got ready at her parents’ house with one bridesmaid, Lauren Louise doing hair and makeup, and a steady rotation of family members putting their heads round the door to check on progress and then leaving again. Her brother, various others. Her dad answered the door to La Collina Gardens and carried the flowers in himself, which is the kind of small job that somehow always falls to a father of the bride on a wedding morning.

It was calm in a way that mornings often aren’t. One bridesmaid instead of six, a house everyone already knew their way around, and nobody watching the clock because Battle was twenty minutes away. I left early for the venue to catch the room filling up.

The ceremony

Everyone gathered in the big hall, under the enormous painting that dominates the room. Two of Alice and John’s family played the music — flute and piano, live, in a room built to carry sound. There’s a particular quality to a ceremony where the music is being played by people who are also guests. Everyone in the room knows exactly what it costs them to hold it together.

Drinks, lawn games, and a football match

Outside afterwards for drinks in the sun, and the wooden games their friends had made by hand. Not hired, not bought – made. That’s the sort of thing I’ll always photograph whether or not anyone’s asked me to, along with the signs on the tables Alice had put together.

By early evening a proper football match had broken out on the school pitch, most of the kids and a decent number of the dads, jackets off, entirely committed. And behind all of it, the sun going down over the battlefield. There aren’t many venues where the view is a thousand years of history and the foreground is somebody’s uncle going in hard on a nine-year-old.

The abbey and cloisters

We slipped round the back of the school for group shots and a few of the two of them, in and around the abbey ruins and the cloisters. It took about twenty minutes total. Old stone, soft light, and no standing around.

Thinking about Battle Abbey?

Battle Abbey suits couples who want their wedding to feel like a good party in an extraordinary building rather than a performance staged inside one. If that sounds like your day, have a look through my Battle Abbey wedding photography guide for more on the venue.