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EDITORIAL
by Peter Jukes & Hardeep Matharu
Seeing the Light
It seems quintessentially English. Though most of our subscribers are not London-based, and we have a readership from across the world, Southwark Cathedral is in effect the parish church for the area in which Byline Times’ office is located.
As a tourist attraction, sitting right next to the 1,000-year-old Borough Market, the old priory – which turned into a church, and then a cathedral last century – is steeped in English history.
The Medieval poet John Gower is entombed in a colourful memorial here, and his contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer set the opening to his Canterbury Tales at the Tabard Inn just around the corner.
St Saviour’s Church, as it was then, was the parish church for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, and Shakespeare’s brother Edmund was buried in the now vanished churchyard. The famous view, pictured, of Jacobean London, was sketched by Wenceslaus Hollar from its Gothic Tower.
But for all its Englishness – in fact, extricable from its Englishness – Southwark Cathedral has always been a place of migration and movement ever since the Romans (whose extensive sense of citizenship, across the Roman Empire, included dozens of ethnicities from the Mediterranean and North Africa) built the first crossing over the Thames at London Bridge. That flow of peoples has not stopped in the 2,000 years since, and Southwark is one of the most diverse boroughs in one of the most diverse cities in the world.
Both of us were invited to an event in the cathedral hosted by our local MP, Neil Coyle, focused on rising racism and division in the country. These are concerns Byline Times has documented extensively this year, and from the Dean’s address (printed here with his kind permission), it was clear that he shares them too.
The evening celebrated the fact that Southwark has been recognised nationally with ‘borough of sanctuary’ status for its work welcoming refugees, embodying that wider sense of citizenship the Romans initiated. It highlighted the productive contributions asylum seekers had made to the life of the locality, who were all proud to call Southwark home.
An imam from one of the borough’s mosques spoke about manners, and school children sang sea shanties. The audience was reminded that Sadiq Khan’s first inauguration as London Mayor in 2016 was held at the Cathedral.
With all the bad news in the media, it’s easy to forget that, on the ground, round the corner, in your own parish, communities are much more peaceful than you would believe. Face to face, people are much kinder than on Facebook.
It’s this sense of the everyday goodness around us that we want to leave you with in our last editorial of 2025. May we all find some sanctuary somewhere in 2026.
Merry Christmas from Byline Times!
Mark Oakley,
Dean of Southwark Cathedral
I watch the news at the moment and never can quite believe what I’m hearing and seeing.
Democracy dismantled in parts of the world, hard-won freedoms and rights abused or taken away, the rise of aggressive nationalisms and many being called Christian – but they are not related to any of the teachings of Jesus Christ – and a toxic social media culture where everyone needs a villain so that we don’t have to face ourselves and who we have become.
Add to all this, so many world leaders are full of high self-esteem and low self-awareness, that the world feels volatile, fragile.
Apart from a large gin and a rant, I never quite know what to do during the news.
But one important thing I can do is to remind myself of Southwark and of the way that we stand together and we stand for each other. And, if there are darker days ahead, we know that we will speak for each other, especially those who are overlooked, scapegoated on, or whose human dignity is abused.
No one is above the law and no one is beneath it either.
When I want to be encouraged, I think about this locality and all we do together peacefully and with mutual respect. You, us, here, now, are promising each other a shared future.
We won’t mourn or be despondent for long, we will organise. We won’t put grievance into circulation, there’s too much of it, so we will keep celebrating without apology what each brings to the whole.
The playwright Brecht once said ‘unhappy the land that needs heroes’, well, at the moment, we need heroes who will stand against hate and stand for generosity, kindness, and cooperation.
To be honest, you are my heroes.
Please know that the Cathedral is here as friend as we face our urgent task to call out what is hateful, unjust, and a shameful picking on minorities and the vulnerable.
To these, Southwark will always say ‘No! Not in our name!’ ✺
