The Croft Hotel Wedding Guide

Most venues give you one way to walk down the aisle.

The Croft gives you two, and the one you choose will shape your ceremony photographs more than your flowers, your dress or the weather outside.

I'll come back to that, because it's the most useful thing on this page.

I'm Aaron — a documentary wedding photographer based in the North East. I've photographed nearly ten weddings at The Croft Hotel in Croft-on-Tees, across all four seasons. This guide is written for couples who've either booked it or are about to, and who want to know what it's actually like to get married there rather than what the brochure says.

No venue is perfect for photographs. The Croft has some real gifts and a couple of things worth planning around. Both are below.

The runway aisle

The Secret Garden Chapel can be set up two ways.

Traditional: rows of chairs facing the altar, an aisle down the middle, guests looking at the back of each other's heads.

Runway: one long raised aisle down the centre of the room, with your guests in two banks facing inwards. Everyone has a front row seat. You walk between them.

I'd choose the runway almost every time, and not for the reason most people assume.

In a traditional set-up, when you walk in, I'm photographing you from the front and everybody else from behind. In the runway set-up, your guests are turned towards you at close range — so the photograph of you walking in also contains your mum, your best mate and your grandad, all reacting, all in focus, all in the same frame.

Those are the ceremony photographs couples actually keep. Not the wide of the room. The one where you can see what everybody's face was doing.

The runway aisle is also lit from beneath — a warm strip of light runs the length of it. It does two things: draws the eye straight down the centre of the frame, and throws soft light up onto you as you walk. Very few venues give you that.

The trade-off, honestly. The runway aisle is narrower than a conventional one, and your guests are close. If the idea of walking between two banks of people looking straight at you makes you feel slightly sick, say so — the traditional set-up is still a good room and I'll work with it. But if you're on the fence, this is the version I'd push you towards.

Ask the venue about the runway set-up at your planning meeting. It isn't always the default, and it's easier to request early than to change late.

The chapel changes more than any room I know

The Secret Garden Chapel has tall sash windows down one side, deep green panelling, burnt-copper walls, rough stone at the altar end, willow hanging overhead and a lit aisle running through the middle of it.

Which means it is a completely different room depending on when you get married in it.

I've photographed both and I wouldn't choose between them. They're different photographs, not better and worse ones.

What this means for you

• A winter or late-afternoon ceremony doesn't suffer here. This is the single most useful thing on this page if you're weighing up a December or January date. At a lot of venues a 3pm winter ceremony is a problem. Here the room is lit either way, so it simply isn't.
• A summer ceremony isn't flat. The windows are on one side rather than all round, so even in full daylight the light has direction — which is what makes people look three-dimensional rather than washed out.
• The willow above the altar frames your first kiss without anyone needing to build an arch.

The only genuinely tricky version is high summer, mid-afternoon, when the difference between the windows and the shaded end of the room is at its widest. It needs no action from you. It's just one of the places where having stood in the room before matters more than it sounds like it should.

Getting ready

Both prep rooms at The Croft have dark walls, and that's a gift rather than a problem.

Stand near a window against dark panelling and you get a portrait with almost no effort — lit face, clean dark background, nothing distracting behind you. It's one of my favourite things about the building.

Two things that help

1. Ask for the room with the largest window and keep the curtains fully open, even if it's grey outside. Grey daylight through a big window is excellent light. Overhead hotel lights are not — I'll usually ask to switch them off.
2. Keep the space you're getting dressed in reasonably clear. Dark rooms photograph beautifully. Dark rooms with fourteen carrier bags and a Deliveroo box in shot photograph less beautifully. It takes two minutes.

If you're doing a first look with your bridesmaids or your dad, do it in the prep room rather than a corridor. The dark walls do the work.

The pink door

The Croft's pink door is the most photographed thing in the building, and for once the hype is deserved. But there are three things about it that couples don't find out until they're standing there.

It gets restyled

The floral surround around that doorway isn't fixed. I've photographed it dressed in ivory and deep green foliage, in pink blossom with protea and trailing amaranthus, and in blush roses with ferns. Ask what's planned for your date — if you've got a colour scheme, it's worth a conversation, and nobody thinks to have it.

It works at every scale

Bride on her own. The two of you. Three groomsmen. A bridal party of eleven, stacked up the steps. The stone surround does the composition for you, and the steps give you natural tiering so nobody at the back disappears. That's rare. Most signature backdrops only really work for two people, and you find that out when you try to put nine in front of one.

It's built for a long veil or a train

The stone steps drop away from the door, so a veil spread down them reads as a shape rather than a puddle. If you've bought a cathedral veil and you're wondering where it earns its money, it's here. Tell me if you've got one and I'll make sure we use the door before it gets muddy.

After dark

The pink door is uplit at night, and the garden has string lights through it.

This is the most under-used opportunity at The Croft. Everyone shoots the door in daylight and nobody comes back out. Ten minutes outside later in the evening — sparklers with your bridal party on the steps, or just the two of you under the lights — gives you a completely different set of photographs from a completely different part of the night, and it costs you almost nothing because the door is thirty seconds from the dance floor.

If you want sparkler photographs, plan three things

1. Long sparklers, not the short cheap ones. You want forty-plus seconds of burn, not fifteen.
2. Two lighters and someone sober in charge of them. The single biggest cause of a failed sparkler shot is half the group's sparklers going out before the other half are lit.
3. A slot in the running order. Ten minutes, straight after the first dance or the buffet. If it isn't in the plan it doesn't happen.

Check with the venue that sparklers are permitted, and where.

The Croft across all four seasons

I've now photographed weddings here in spring, summer, autumn and winter. The venue gives you a noticeably different day in each, and none of them is the bad one.

• Spring — blossom on the trees around the forecourt, everything waking up, and the softest light of the four.
• Summer — the chapel fills with daylight, everyone spills onto the terrace and stays out there, and confetti against full green foliage is about as good as confetti gets.
• Autumn — the planting around the garden and the walled corner turns gold and copper, and confetti on a path already covered in fallen leaves looks like it was styled that way.
• Winter — you get the building. Flat grey light does nothing to the pink door, the chapel doesn't care what time the sun sets, and the uplighting and string lights start earning their keep at four in the afternoon rather than nine at night. Which means the evening photographs happen while everyone is still upright and enjoying themselves.

If you're choosing between dates at The Croft, don't let photographs be the deciding factor. Pick on price and availability.

Confetti

Confetti happens on the gravel forecourt at the front of the hotel, with the white building behind you.

Three things that make confetti photographs good rather than average

1. Two lines, not a circle. Ask your ushers to form two lines with a gap wide enough to walk through comfortably. A circle means half your guests have their backs to me.
2. Walk slowly and don't stop. Everyone's instinct is to rush through it. At a normal pace you get five or six usable frames instead of one.
3. Do it twice. Nobody has ever regretted a second run. Everyone throws better the second time, and you're both laughing by then.

Check the current confetti rules with the venue — most now specify dried petals only, though I've photographed paper confetti there too, so it's worth asking rather than assuming.

The Garden Suite

This is where the rest of the day happens — exposed brick, hanging greenery, beaded chandeliers, wall lanterns, cane chairs around round tables, and a sliding glass wall onto the covered terrace.

That glass wall is the thing to understand about the room. From your table you can see straight out into the garden — the planting, the lanterns, the fire pits — which is why people actually go out there rather than just being told they can. Most venues put the outdoor space round a corner and behind a fire door, and it stays empty all night.

Your entrance into the room is a real moment, so don't waste it

Guests are seated, you come in together, and there's a natural beat where the whole room reacts. If your venue coordinator offers to have guests wave napkins as you come in — say yes. It sounds daft written down. In practice it turns a walk across a room into fifty people on their feet making a racket, and it photographs like nothing else on the day. Ten seconds, no cost, no rehearsal.

The brick and the greenery do the work

You don't need to fill this room with decor to make it photograph well. Some couples spend heavily on styling a space that was already styled. Put the money into flowers people will actually stand next to — the chapel aisle, the pink door — rather than into filling a room that came finished.

The retractable roof and the fire pits on the terrace mean the party spills outside even in February, which is where a lot of the best guest photographs come from. People behave differently once they're through a door.

A timeline that works at The Croft

This is a shape, not a rule. Adjust it around your ceremony time and your caterer's plan — but the proportions are what matter.

On the portrait timing

I don't need an hour. Twenty minutes at The Croft is plenty, because the good backdrops are thirty seconds from the front door. If we get a stretch of nice light later on I'll grab you for another ten minutes, but the plan doesn't depend on it.

On group photographs

Pick six to eight groups, write them down, and give the list to two people who know everybody by sight and aren't shy about shouting. That's the whole trick. Done properly it's fifteen minutes. Done badly it's fifty, and fifty is how you lose your drinks reception.

Do the proper bridal party shot — everybody looking, everybody tidy — and then immediately do a second one where they're allowed to behave like themselves. It takes an extra thirty seconds. The second frame is usually the one that ends up on the wall, and the first is the one that goes to the grandparents. You want both.

And do the everyone shot. The forecourt is wide enough to get your entire guest list into one frame, which a lot of venues can't manage without someone standing in a flowerbed. It takes about four minutes if you do it straight after confetti while everyone is already outside and in one place. Leave it until later and you'll spend twenty minutes extracting people from the bar. It's the photograph parents ask for most often and the one couples most often forget to put on the list.