Dean Robert Willis

Dean of Canterbury from 2001 to 2022, Robert Willis spent the last years of his cathedral ministry filming Morning Prayer from a small garden in Kent, and almost without meaning to, gathered a congregation of viewers from around the world.

Born in Bristol in 1947 and educated at the University of Warwick and Worcester College, Oxford, Robert was ordained in the early 1970s. He served as a curate in Shrewsbury, as a vicar choral at Salisbury Cathedral, as team rector in Tisbury, as Vicar of Sherborne Abbey, and as Dean of Hereford before being installed as Dean of Canterbury on 1 July 2001.

He retired on 16 May 2022, the day before his seventy-fifth birthday, and was made Dean Emeritus of Canterbury. He spent his last years as a resident fellow at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, preaching across the United States and Canada, and died in New Haven, Connecticut, on 22 October 2024.

Robert was a hymn writer, pianist, and lifelong lover of opera and poetry. His hymns, among them "Let Us Light a Candle" and "Earth's Fragile Beauties We Possess", are sung in cathedrals on both sides of the Atlantic. He was an honorary doctor of Berkeley Divinity School and of the University of Kent, and held the Cross of St Augustine from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Above all, those who joined him each morning came to know him by his voice: unhurried, generous, fond of a story, and rarely far from a quiet joke about whichever cat had wandered into the shot.

Fletcher Banner

Robert's partner of more than twenty years, who picked up a camera one March morning in 2020 and did not put it down again for the best part of three years.

Fletcher filmed and edited every broadcast from the Deanery garden. He often worked long after the morning's recording, stitching together footage, voice, and music into something a few thousand people could open over their tea. On bad days the program might not be online until late afternoon, after weather, software, or a curious cat had had their say.

He was also the quiet voice behind the scenes: the one with strong opinions about which hat Robert ought to wear, when a story should run, and which of the cats was his favourite (Monkey, by his own admission). The broadcasts were Robert's ministry, but they were Fletcher's craft, and the partnership made both possible.

One story Robert was fond of recounting was Fletcher's family travels through the hinterland of Turkey in September 1997, where a village guide led them to a small house with weeping villagers gathered around a television set, watching the funeral of Princess Diana. They were ushered inside as honoured guests, on the understanding that this was very much their own occasion.

Stories like that found their way into Morning Prayer often, woven in beside the psalm and the saint of the day. The garden was a place where life and prayer were never quite separable.

Significant Others

The cast that made the broadcasts what they were: the cats, the cockerel, the hens, the hedgehogs, and a slowly growing circle of friends near and far.

The cats kept stealing the show. Leo went viral the morning he walked under Robert's cassock, and the clip travelled as far as the New York Times and CNN. Tiger, with his fondness for milk, made off with a pancake one Shrove Tuesday and was never quite forgiven. Lily chased whatever moved in the long grass. Monkey, the elder statesman of the household and Fletcher's particular companion, was much missed when he died.

Beyond the cats: Russell the cockerel, whose enormous morning crow regularly upstaged the opening prayer; the hens Winnie and Clemmy, brought across the lawn in the rain when the weather turned; a trio of orphaned hedgehogs in the care of friends Beryl and Alan; and many human friends besides. Among them were June Taylor, much missed when she died one Lent; Andrew McGowan, Dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and a welcome at every visit; Carys, who watched faithfully from afar and wrote in often; and the many thousands who showed up morning by morning without ever stepping into the garden.

The Deanery

The Deanery at Canterbury Cathedral, Robert's home for twenty-one years, and the unlikely set of a daily prayer broadcast watched on every continent.

A working house with a working garden, the Deanery sits in the shadow of the cathedral itself. The french windows opened straight onto the lawn that became, in lockdown, the most visited prayer space in the world. Around the corner stood the orchard, a brook the cats drank from, a backcourt where the colours of the leaves changed week by week, and a library from which, on the evening of 6 January 2021, Robert recorded a quieter message of concern to American friends at the close of a difficult day.

Every broadcast opened the same way: "good morning, and welcome to the Deanery garden at Canterbury Cathedral. Wherever you are in the world, please feel welcome, and bring your own concerns." That sentence, said so many times it became a small liturgy of its own, is the one most people remember.

The Garden Congregation

A congregation that named itself.

Viewers from across the world began identifying themselves, in messages and comments, as part of "the garden congregation", and Robert simply took them at their word. Prayers came in from Melbourne in its long lockdown, from La Palma under the volcano, from China, from the Americas, and from the small villages of Kent. Morning by morning the list grew, and the garden grew with it.

This site preserves the archive: over a thousand recordings, the playlists Robert curated from the book readings to the Just So Stories, The Wind in the Willows, and his much loved Travels with a Donkey, alongside transcripts, hymns, and the posts from Buy Me a Coffee where members have supported the work from the start. The cathedral garden has closed; the Garden Congregation has not.

Support the ministry of the GC

Morning by morning through that first long lockdown, the voice from the garden was the most steadying thing in my day. I am still here, several years on, with my tea and a candle.

A viewer in Melbourne

I was raised in the Church of England and had drifted away by my forties. Then a friend sent me a link to the Deanery garden, and I have been listening every morning since.

A viewer in Toronto

Robert taught us how to pray in a garden, wherever in the world we happened to be. The cathedral garden has closed, but the prayers have not stopped.

A viewer in Kent

January 2025