Wedding at the Royal Courts of Justice, London

Navid and Roujin’s wedding day moved across three of central London’s most distinctive locations: the Corinthia Hotel in Whitehall for prep, Hyde Park for the couple portraits, and the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand for the ceremony itself — a traditional Persian Aghd in one of the most extraordinary Gothic Revival buildings in the country. It was one of the most enjoyable weddings I’ve shot in London, and the kind of day that’s only really possible when the couple know what they want and the suppliers all know their jobs.

Getting Ready at the Corinthia Hotel, Whitehall

Bridal prep at the Corinthia is one of the easier briefs in London. The corner suites have huge sash windows and good morning light, the rooms are quiet, and the events team understand that the morning needs to run at its own pace.
Navid and Roujin used adjacent suites — bridal prep with the bridesmaids in one, the groom and his family in the other. I started with Roujin: dress, shoes, jewellery, the usual quiet detail shots, then the ten or fifteen minutes of laughter and last-minute pep talks that always make for the best prep frames. Across the corridor, Navid’s prep was shorter and more tradition-leaning — the suit, the family blessings, a small round of photographs with the parents before everyone left for the venue.
The Corinthia’s lobby and the staircase outside the suites gave us a couple of quick hotel-architecture frames before they left for the cars. Worth knowing if you’re getting ready there: the ground-floor lobby photographs particularly well in late morning, and the building’s exterior on Whitehall Place is a strong departure shot.

A Scenic Prelude at Hyde Park

We split the morning so we could get a proper portrait session in Hyde Park between the prep and the ceremony — twenty-five minutes, in three locations, on the way from the Corinthia to the Royal Courts.
We started near the Serpentine for the soft, open-water light, walked through the Rose Garden (in full bloom that month — one of the best portrait grounds in central London when the roses are out), then finished at the Italian Gardens at the north end of the park, which gives a very different feel — the formal stone fountains and pergolas reading more like a continental palace garden than a London park.
Three settings, three completely different photographic feels, and all without leaving Hyde Park. Couples often forget how much variety the park gives you in twenty minutes — it’s one of the reasons it’s such a good central-London portrait location.

The Royal Courts of Justice

The Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand is one of London’s most spectacular wedding venues, and one of the rarest. Designed by George Edmund Street and completed in 1882, it’s the largest civil court complex in England — eighty-eight courtrooms and a central Main Hall the size of a cathedral nave. The building isn’t a regular wedding venue: civil ceremonies happen there only occasionally, by special arrangement, and Persian and South Asian ceremonies in particular work brilliantly in the space.
The Main Hall is the headline space — vaulted ceilings, mosaic floor, tall stained-glass windows at the east end. For Persian weddings, the Aghd table sits in the centre of the hall under the vault, with the Sofreh Aghd spread out in front of the couple.

The Ceremony

Persian wedding ceremonies are some of my favourite to photograph — they’re rich in symbolism, deeply visual, and slow enough that the photography can be properly observational rather than rushed.
The Aghd is the contractual ceremony — vows, signing, exchange. The Sofreh Aghd is the spread of symbolic objects placed in front of the couple: a mirror (representing brightness in the future), candelabras (energy and light), an open Hafez or other holy text (wisdom and a long life), a tray of seven herbs and spices, sweets and pastries, decorative eggs (fertility), wild rue (warding off evil), and a length of fabric held above the couple’s heads by close family while sugar is ground over them by the women of the family — symbolic of sweetening the marriage.
The pace of an Aghd is unhurried. The mirror is positioned so the bride and groom see each other through the glass for the first time as a married couple. The sugar-grinding involves several family members moving around the couple over the course of fifteen or twenty minutes. There’s space, in other words, to photograph everything properly — close detail of the Sofreh, family interaction, ceremony reactions, the symbolic moments — without ever feeling rushed.
The Royal Courts’ Gothic architecture sat alongside the Persian elements unusually well. The Main Hall’s stone vaults gave the ceremony a cathedral-scale weight, while the colour and warmth of the Persian table and decoration brought it back to something intimate and personal. That contrast is most of what makes Royal Courts ceremonies photograph well — old building, ancient ceremony, the two anchoring each other.

Photographing Inside the Royal Courts of Justice

A few practical notes if you’re considering the Royal Courts as a venue.
The light is unusual. The Main Hall’s stained-glass windows give beautiful coloured light through certain hours of the day, but it also means the floor of the hall is variably lit and quite dark in the middle. I worked with available light through the ceremony — the warm, low ambient sits well with Persian ceremony tones — and only added subtle off-camera flash for one or two of the formal post-ceremony portraits.
The architecture rewards a wide lens. The vault in the Main Hall is high enough that you need to step back and shoot wide to get any sense of the space; up-close shots tell you nothing about where you actually are. I move between a wide and a long lens through the ceremony, mostly to vary scale.
Portraits work in three places. The Main Hall itself for the formal frames, the staircase and corridor outside for the architectural close-up portraits, and the front courtyard on the Strand for the departure shots. Twenty minutes covers all three.
Quiet is non-negotiable. The Royal Courts is still a working civil court complex. Wedding photography there has to be discreet by definition — no wandering, no flash spillage during the ceremony, no setups in restricted areas. I treat it as I would a small church wedding: quiet, observational, in and out.

Wrapping the Day

The mark of a well-planned wedding day is that the photography never has to drive the timeline — and Navid and Roujin’s day was planned with that in mind. Three completely different venues, twenty minutes of London driving between them, but never once did the schedule pinch the photography. That’s the difference between a good wedding day and a great one.
The gallery from the day moves across the three locations and the cultural depth of the Aghd, and I’m grateful to the couple for trusting me with such a distinctive brief. Persian weddings at the Royal Courts of Justice are a rare combination of venue and tradition — one of the more memorable London weddings I’ve shot.
— Barrie