Cambridge Cottage Kew Gardens Wedding Photography

About weddings at Cambridge Cottage

An intimate wedding venue (by Kew garden standards), Cambridge Cottage is a bit of a blank canvas set in it’s own private gardens on the Kew Estate. It can accommodate up to 80 guests and they can also hold outdoor ceremonies, with your guests on the lawn of the Duke’s Garden.

The space can be treated like a dry hire space – so you can decorate it as you like and have a choice of caterers and other vendors. It’s worth knowing that you can only work with their own floristry team, and you can’t throw confetti in the grounds – not even dried petals – because they don’t want to risk any of the specimens in their collection, as you’ll see in this blog post, and in my post about Kayleigh & Ashley’s wedding at the Nash Conservatory, bubbles make a damn fine alternative choice.

Prices for hiring Cambridge Cottage are from £2,500 + Vat and depend on the day chosen.

Why Kew Gardens weddings are awesome

I’m sure if you’re reading this you have a pretty good idea about why Kew Gardens weddings are so wonderful – obviously it’s an iconic London location and somewhere that feels ‘special’. With this in mind, after your Kew Gardens wedding you could always take out a membership and come back at weekends – it becomes your place.

When you get married at Cambridge Cottage (and other Kew venues) part of the booking fee includes a lovely member of Kew staff and an electric buggy to whizz you through the grounds to your favourite locations to take some couple photos. It’s worth having a think about this in advance as it’s so vast, and you may wish to consider this in light of what comes into bloom when. We went all the way to the edge of the site to visit the Rhododendron Dell, to find that they’d mostly already bloomed and been somewhat killed off by a few days of very hot weather, so that’s a consideration. I believe if you want to take photos in any of the glasshouses, you’ll need special permission. So it’s worth liaising with your wedding co-ordinator about that.

Hannah & Tom’s Cambridge Cottage wedding

I’m casting my mind alllll the way back to June 2021, and Hannah & Tom’s glorious Cambridge Cottage Kew Garden wedding. It has been ages and ages since I last shared a wedding on my site – 2021 has had me, and indeed the whole of the wedding industry, playing catch up with a wonderful mix of new bookings and postponed weddings from the last 18 months. I’ve been sharing snippets of everything over on my Instagram feed, so you can check out the latest over there.

Back in June 2021, you could have 30 people at your wedding, you could have an indoor reception but you couldn’t hold a drink and stand up. It feels like a lifetime ago, despite being 3.5 months. However this all meant that we had almost unprecedented access to a calm, quiet Kew Gardens for photos. Being behind the barriers in the Temperate House meant that I was able to live my ultimate botanical, editorial fantasy and our driver took us up to the Rhododendron Dell, deep in the ‘wilds’ to get some shots by the last of these blousy, fantastical blooms.

Hannah and Tom kept it low key and personal, inviting only their nearest and dearest; meeting together for a quiet drink in the pub across the green before the ceremony and serving curry for dinner because so many of Kew’s recommended caterers were a bit overly fancy for such a laid back do. Right at the beginning of the 2021 season, this was a perfect post lockdown introduction back into weddings.