The dean of St Paul's is dean (head) of the chapter of St Paul's Cathedral, the cathedral church of the diocese of London in the Church of England. Since 1957, the dean of St Paul's is also ex officio the Dean of the Order of the British Empire.
The current dean is Andrew Tremlett, who was installed on 25 September 2022.
The wedding of Prince Charles (later King Charles III) and Lady Diana Spencer took place on Wednesday, 29 July 1981, at St Paul's Cathedral in London, United Kingdom. The groom was the heir apparent to the British throne, and the bride was a member of the Spencer family.
The ceremony was a traditional Church of England wedding service. Alan Webster, Dean of St Paul's, presided at the service, and Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, conducted the marriage. Notable figures in attendance included many members of other royal families, republican heads of state, and members of the bride's and groom's families. After the ceremony, the couple made the traditional appearance on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. The United Kingdom had a national holiday on that day to mark the wedding. The ceremony featured many ceremonial aspects, including use of the state carriages and roles for the Foot Guards and Household Cavalry.
John Donne (/dʌn/ DUN; 1571 or 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a recusant family, who later became a cleric in the Church of England. Under royal patronage, he was made Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London (1621–1631). He is considered the preeminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His poetical works are noted for their metaphorical and sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs and satires. He is also known for his sermons.
Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society. A theme in Donne's later poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorised. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits.
Alan Brunskill Webster KCVO (1 July 1918 – 3 September 2007) was a British Anglican priest. He had a varied career, serving in parish roles, heading a theological college, and leading two cathedrals as their dean. As Dean of Norwich from 1970 to 1978, he modernised the cathedral and its services, and opened up its buildings to the public. He ended his ministry as Dean of St Paul's, between 1978 and 1987, during which the cathedral saw the Wedding of Charles and Diana, and the so-called 'Victory Service' following the Falklands War.
Berkhamsted (/ˈbɜːrkəmstɛd/ BUR-kəm-sted) is a market town in Hertfordshire, England. Located in the Bulbourne valley, it is 26 miles (42 km) north-west of London and had a population of 21,245 at the 2021 census. The town is a civil parish within the borough of Dacorum which is based in the neighbouring large new town of Hemel Hempstead. Berkhamsted, along with the adjoining village of Northchurch, is surrounded by countryside, and the Chiltern Hills, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB).
Berkhamsted was first mentioned in 970 CE and was recorded as a burbium (ancient borough) in the Domesday Book in 1086. A (now ruined) motte-and-bailey Norman castle was built shortly after the Norman Conquest and remained a royal possession and residence for four centuries. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the town was a wool trading centre, with a busy local market. The oldest-known extant jettied timber-framed building in Great Britain, built between 1277 and 1297, survives as a shop on the town's high street.The town's literary connections include the 17th-century hymnist and poet William Cowper, the 18th-century writer Maria Edgeworth and the 20th-century novelist Graham Greene. Arts institutions in the town include The Rex (a well regarded independent cinema) and the British Film Institute's BFI National Archive at King's Hill, which is one of the largest film and television archives in the world. Schools in the town include Berkhamsted School, a co-educational boarding independent school (founded in 1541 by John Incent, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral); Ashlyns School, a state school, whose history began as the Foundling Hospital established in London by Thomas Coram in 1742; and Ashridge Executive Education, a business school offering degree level courses, which occupies the Grade I listed neo-Gothic Ashridge House.