Sam and Matt got married at St Paul’s Cathedral on the 4th of July — one of those still, proper summer days that London doesn’t hand out often. A small group under the dome, vows exchanged where the light drops in from sixty feet up, then a short walk across town to Mayfair for dinner with immediate family only. No band, no top table of speeches, just the people who matter most, round one table, until late.
Getting married at St Paul’s
Weddings at St Paul’s are rare, and it’s not somewhere you can simply book. The Cathedral marries couples who have a genuine connection to it — through the clergy, the choir, the staff, or the wider community it serves. For Sam and Matt that connection came through Matt’s father, Malcolm Wilson OBE. The Order of the British Empire has its own chapel down in the Cathedral crypt, and it was that link which opened the door for the ceremony to happen there at all.
It’s worth mentioning because it changed how I shot the day. This wasn’t a venue I could scout the week before and come back to. You get one run at it, so I spent the morning doing a lot of looking up before I ever raised the camera.
Under the dome
Nothing quite prepares you for how St Paul’s swallows sound. The service felt hushed in a way a normal wedding never does — the readings, the vows, even the laughter, all of it seemed to travel up into the dome rather than around the room. It made for a strange, lovely contrast: this enormous, echoing space, and two people who clearly weren’t thinking about any of it, just about each other.
I kept the camera quiet and stayed at the edges. In a space that size you don’t need to get close to get the moment — the scale does half the work for you.
Out onto the steps
Whatever’s happened inside, walking back out through those doors into daylight is always a reset. The west steps at St Paul’s are one of the great London backdrops — that huge colonnaded front, the piazza below, the odd tourist stopping to work out what they’ve just walked into. Four days into July and it was warm enough that nobody was reaching for a coat, which in this country counts as a small miracle.
Portraits around the Cathedral
We didn’t need to go far. A wander around the edges of the Cathedral gives you Portland stone at every angle, and on a clear afternoon like this one the light was doing something soft and golden by early evening. I gave Sam and Matt somewhere to walk and something to talk about rather than posing them into shapes — it’s the only way to get photos that look like two people rather than a catalogue shoot.
Dinner in Mayfair
From there it was a short drive to Mayfair, where a private dining room had been booked for immediate family only. After the scale of the Cathedral it was a properly different register — low light, close table, the sort of dinner where the conversation doesn’t need raising over a band or a microphone. Just Sam and Matt’s nearest people, glasses being topped up, and a wedding day winding down exactly the way the best ones do.
Sam and Matt
Congratulations to you both. Thank you for trusting me with a day that doesn’t come round very often — for either of us. Your full gallery is on its way.
Thinking about St Paul’s Cathedral for your own photos?
Access to the Cathedral for a ceremony is genuinely restricted, but the exterior — the steps, the piazza, the view from the Millennium Bridge — is one of the best backdrops in London for a portrait session, wedding day or otherwise. I’ve put together a full guide to shooting there, with the best spots and the best times of day.
