Hannah & Scott’s stunning winter wedding at Pentney Abbey, with Rob Dodsworth Photography

Published by Claire Gould on February 5, 2021February 5, 2021

Elegant styling and incredible florals for a classic English wedding. Today’s stunning bride Hannah wears a Pronovias gown from House of Snow, with Scott looking super handsome in a Ted Baker suit with velvet tie. This is a beautiful pre-pandemic wedding, and a treasured reminder of how weddings were, and will be again. Images are by our lovely friend Rob Dodsworth Photography, a Norfolk wedding photographer.

Wedding photographer’s website

https://www.robdodsworth.co.uk

How did you choose your photographer?

Searched online with help of my bridesmaids. Turns out my friend that is getting married also chose Rob as her photographer at a similar time which was a complete coincidence!

Were you pleased with your wedding photographer? Do tell… we love a brilliant review!

Yes we were very happy with Rob. Neither of us particularly like having our photo taken and didn’t want to spend half of our wedding day having photos taken doing cringe poses, that just isn’t us. Rob made us feel at ease and most of the time we didn’t even notice he was there! Him and the videographer worked really well together! We have an album of amazing photos that really captures the day which is what we were after, rather than just an album of posed shots! We would highly recommend him!

Videographer details if applicable – and any thoughts for other couples about having a wedding video?

https://www.rideoutfilms.com/

Here’s our wedding video trailer.

Due to the budget and not feeling it was necessary we weren’t going to have a videographer, but my mum insisted we did so she offered to pay for it. We chose Rideout Films because he did my brothers wedding a couple of years before and the quality was excellent and again he seemed to fit into the sort of thing we liked.
Our wedding video is amazing, everyone has commented on it being the best video they have ever seen! It is now the one thing that we say to people you really should have at your wedding and advise them to sacrifice other things for it! The day goes SO fast (everyone says this to you before your wedding and you don’t really listen, but it really does go so fast!) so having the video is so nice to look back on. We have a short trailer plus a 20 minute video and then separate speeches and ceremony. I could not recommend Rideout films highly enough!

Tell us about your venue – what made this place special for you?

We got married at Pentney Abbey in Norfolk. The venue is beautiful, we got married at the top of the gatehouse and then the rest of the day was in the barn. The gatehouse is fairly small which made it feel much more personal, and the venue overall was the perfect size for the number of guests we had. Our wedding planner Hannah was amazing, she thought of everything and made the day run so smoothly, I didn’t have to worry about anything, we were just able to enjoy our day!

Did you love wearing your outfits? How was the dress / suit shopping experience?

I think I went to 4 dress shops in total, with the last one being where I found my dress. 2 of my work colleagues had got their dresses from there and highly recommended it. It was House of Snow in Bury St Edmunds. Harriet and her team were fantastic, she put me at ease with the things I was worried about and helped me to find my perfect dress (even if it was the most expensive one I had tried on!). The dress was exactly what I wanted, it was fitted with long sleves, high neck and low back with beautiful detailing down the sleves and sides of the dress. It was by Provonias. I loved wearing my dress and didn’t want to take it off! I am waiting for all of my other friends to get married so we can have a wedding dress party after and wear our dresses again!

Suit shopping was a less fun experience and I found it far more stressful than dress shopping! My husband isn’t really a shopper so trying to get him enthusiastic about going shopping for a suit was difficult. My husband ended up with a lovely navy ted baker suit, with dark burgundy cord/velvety tie and white shirt.

Did you hire a florist? Tell us about any floral amazingness

Years before we got engaged I knew who I wanted to be the florist for my wedding because of how good they are. We had Swaffham and Fakenham florist who have now changed their name to Floral Sistas. They are an amazing family run business! I 100% trusted Michelle and her team to just ‘get’ what I wanted even with my poor description! The flowers were just beautiful, even better than I had expected. The colours and the texture were perfect! They are reasonably priced as far as florists go and actively seek ways of making things cheeper for you for example moving pieces from the ceremony room to other rooms later in the day. Despite being extremely busy their customer service is also excellent! I could not recommend them highly enough.

Did you hire a wedding planner?

We didn’t hire a wedding planner but we had a wedding coordinator included in the package at Pentney Abbey. Hannah Miller was our wedding planner, she was amazing. She was SO organised it really made me feel at ease and I didn’t have to worry about anything as I knew she had it covered! She also helped to ensure the whole day ran smoothly and was there throughout!

As cake lovers here at English Wedding we’d LOVE to know who made your cake, and how delicious it was?

We used Temper and Glaze for our cake: http://www.temperandglaze.co.uk/

We had a 4 tier cake, vanilla, carrot, chocolate and lemon. The cake was SO tasty and looked beautiful. Jasmin was really flexible when I changed my mind on things and made the whole process really easy, not only that she was really reasonably priced compared with other cake suppliers! I would highly recommend her!

Tell us about any special personal touches, or creative projects you made yourselves

I’m not very creative so we didn’t really do anything like that ourselves. We used Penny at the little lending company https://thelittlelendingcompany.com/ for accessories and decoration hire. She offers various different packages, but we just hired pieces from her and had her do all of our signage rather than having a package. She provided advice on what pieces to choose and how to style things based on some photos I showed her and some very rough descriptions! She works closely with floral sistas so when the florists came and set up they used Penny’s pieces to style the tables and other areas around the flowers. Penny was really flexible, adding extra signage for us at the last minute which we really appreciated!

My friend Megan Spriggs designed our wedding invitations – they were beautiful. She doesn’t have a business for this but she is so talented she really should start one!

Did you personalise your vows or have any wedding readings? What were they?

We didn’t personalise our vows. We had 2 readings, one done by one of the bridesmaids Jodie and one by a close family friend, Chris. The readings were: Union by Robert Fulghum and The Art of Marriage by Wilfred Arlan Peterson.

What was your first dance song? Why did you choose it?

Our first dance song was Al Green, Let’s stay together. We both love Motown and the song lyrics were very fitting for our personal situation having been through a lot together the previous 2 years.