COSMOPOLITAN rarely refers back to the Seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell, but he “might well approve of Tinder”, a author in that magazine once suggested. Whether he would have grasped “swiping right”, the dating app has united two young churchwardens on the London church where he’s buried, and he would, perhaps, be pleased to listen to of their union.
Oliver and Catherine Flory, wardens of St Giles-in-the-Fields, were married there last month, having met on Tinder ten years ago. Both had been raised as Anglicans. Oliver was already attending St Giles’s, after seeing a play there. Catherine soon joined him.
‘It’s a modern-day fairytale’
The 1662 Prayer Book rite was used for his or her wedding on 30 August, and was a chance to “exhibit St Giles in all her glory” to a packed church, with music by Purcell and hymns composed of “all bangers, no clangers”.
“We were sitting on the front on the 2 chairs and the anthem was playing and we had a moment to look out into our church stuffed with our people and see all of them together and it just felt really special,” Catherine said.
She recalled how she had initially found the BCP service to be barely “stuffy”, but reflected that “the more you get into it, the more you begin to listen to the cadence in it, and it becomes this glorious framework. I feel you hear a latest word in it each time you listen and it shifts and changes. It takes on different complexions, I believe, depending on time of the 12 months.”
As a married couple, they proceed to function churchwardens — an office that Oliver has held since 2018, before Catherine was elected in 2022. Having grown up in Bermuda (Marvell’s “isle so long unknown And yet far kinder than our own”) with a churchwarden father, she said that she had memories of him travelling by moped during hurricane season “with giant sheets of plywood, boarding up the almshouses”. While the weather is less dramatic in central London, her husband said that that they had recently had to make use of nappies to take in water ingress.
Churchwardening has brought them each joy. “I believe we’ve got been a very good team,” Catherine said. “We needed to develop ways of working together on a giant project.” Being a lawyer by occupation “is being inherently a little bit of a stickler”. Oliver — who said that his wife was “significantly better than I’m” — hoped that she might proceed for one more 15 years, as only the second woman to be a churchwarden within the parish.
Against the backdrop of a national shortage of churchwardens, each spoke encouragingly in regards to the office and what it involves.
“I won’t sugar-coat it: it’s a variety of responsibility,” Catherine said. “We are incredibly lucky that we’ve got a network around us of very knowledgeable people. But it’s really rewarding. You have a chance to be a part of an even bigger project. You don’t need a sign-up fee, you get to fulfill people from walks of life, from ages and stages of life, different generations, that you simply wouldn’t get to inside a social-media bubble, school bubble, sometimes even a piece bubble.”
“I feel so far more involved within the lifetime of the parish; I actually have made many more friends out of parishioners,” Oliver said. “It’s very unusual for people of any generation, let alone our generation, to be involved in a project that’s possibly a hundred-year project, that you’re going to never ever see the tip of, and you’re just helping that.” Before stepping down, he said he hoped to see the ground of the crypt levelled, to present a “flying start” to a future generation “so that they can do what they need with it”.
As a part of their duties, they recently led the “beating of the bounds” across the parish. Worries about succession were diminishing, she said, as St Giles’s was seeing signs of its own quiet revival. “It’s a cumulative thing. One younger person starts coming; one other walks in.”
