Chiswick church celebrates 30 years of Fr Kevin’s ministry

Parishioners at St Michael & All Angels Church have celebrated 30 years of Fr Kevin Morris’s ministry as their vicar with a special Choral Mass, glasses of fizz and a display of photographs documenting his three decades at the church. The highlight was a cake on which he was immortalised in icing sugar: local cake artist Sara Gronmark portrayed him as St Michael with the defeated dragon at his feet, and holding a Bedford Park Festival programme. Fr Kevin and 30th anniversary cake
Fr Kevin was installed as the church’s vicar on Pentecost Sunday in May 1996 and opened his first Bedford Park Festival a few weeks later. He later married Miriam Solly, then the organiser of the Festival’s Green Days weekend, who was presented with flowers during the service for her support as ‘the woman behind every successful man’. Vicar says ‘I do’ The Festival has been run by the church for 60 years, to bring the community together and raise funds for its conservation, and Fr Kevin has presided over its growth as one of the highlights of the Chiswick year. Thanking him at the end of the service, churchwarden Peter Haigh said Fr Kevin was a wonderful spiritual leader, who always found the right words in his sermons at weddings, funerals and major services, and had championed the arts as a central part of the church’s outreach in the community. Fr Kevin and Nicki Chapman
St Michael’s has also just marked 25 years of the rebuilding of its Parish Hall, which Fr Kevin led and oversaw. This re-energised the Bedford Park Festival, helping make St Michael’s one of Chiswick’s most active cultural centres, hosting concerts, talks and craft events and enabling it to launch the Chiswick Book Festival. It also made it a centre of education through a long-term partnership with Orchard House School and children’s dance classes. Richard Coles & Fr Kevin
The display of photographs - which is still open in the church - included newspaper cuttings showing a young Fr Kevin launching the fund-raising appeal and several of him with Chiswick celebrities on Green Days weekend, including Richard Briers, Graham Seed, Kevin McNally, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Nicki Chapman, Richard Coles, Mary Nightingale and Jeremy Vine. Photos by Jim Cox and Torin Douglas