Brian Mountford has been Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford for nearly 25 years. He is also an honorary Canon of Christ Church Cathedral and Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford.

Way back in 1968 he started out as a curate in Westminster and then Bayswater, central London, in the days when the Church of England was less divided, religion didn’t feel so much under fire from secularism, and he could walk comfortably down Queensway in a cassock. Then he spent six years as Fellow and Chaplain of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, newly married, and at the time when women were first admitted to the college. After that he was appointed Vicar of Southgate in North London, not far from his childhood home. This was classic suburbia, ever so slightly soulless, and difficult to learn the names of streets that all looked the same.

The University Church, which has the ‘dreamiest’ of all the ‘Dreaming Spires’, was the principal public building of the medieval Oxford University. Today it’s the most visited parish church in England and a centre for public theology, having recently hosted conversations with such people as George Soros, Philip Pullman, Rowan Williams, Mark Thompson (Director General of the BBC), Richard Dawkins, Frank Field MP and John Sentamu (Archbishop of York).

Brian was Founding Chair of the Gatehouse Drop in Centre for homeless people and he is a Trustee of Family Links, a charity that promotes emotional health amongst parents, children, in prisons and across cultural boundaries.

He lives in Oxford, UK.