The Dean's Annual Report
The Dean’s Annual Report Annual Parochial Church Meeting 7 May 2017 Editor Marie Tims Design Evelin Arweck Images Southwark Diocesan Communications Contents The Dean’s Report page 6 Reports page 34 Summary of Annual Accounts 2016, page 36 Southwark Cathedral Enterprises, page 42 Fundraising, page 47 Education Centre, page 49 Unity Group, page 52 Cathedral School, page 55 Southwark and Newington Deanery Synod, page 59 The Dean’s Report Dean's Report Any year in the life of the Cathedral has something outstanding, something about it that defines the year, something that people won’t forget. Well, this past year has seen three things that have been important to Southwark Cathedral and in many ways are unforgettable. Back in 2012, the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy wrote a poem about Southwark Cathedral which she entitled A Human Haunt. Five years later it continues to tell a good tale: St Mary Overie, St Saviour, Southwark, over the river, a human haunt in stone, thousand years here, the sweet Thames well recalls. Who came? Nuns, brothers, in good faith, saints, poets– John Gower, whose blind head, look, rests on the pillow of his books; Chaucer, imagining the pilgrims’ first steps on the endless written road we follow now, good readers; Shakespeare, with twenty cold shillings for a funeral bell- players, publicans, paupers, politicians, princes, all to this same, persistent, changing space, between fire and water, theatre and marketplace; us, lighting our candles in the calm cathedral, future ghosts, eating our picnic on a bench. What she captured in this poem was something of the spirit of the place, something of the rich history with its various famous characters and something of the modern and challenging situation in which we find ourselves.
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