Andrew Rumsey was installed at the Cathedral on Saturday before 1,500 people, ending a vacancy that ran 374 days from Bishop Alan Smith's last day in office.
The Rt Revd Dr Andrew Rumsey was installed as the eleventh Bishop of St Albans at the Cathedral on Saturday 19 September. The diocese says over 1,500 worshippers and civic guests filled the building, with a further 4,000 watching the service streamed live.
The service closed a gap at the top of the diocese that had run for more than a year.
The see was vacant for 374 days
Bishop Alan Smith announced his retirement in a letter to the diocese on 7 January 2025. He wrote that, with the King’s permission, he would retire as diocesan bishop on 31 May 2025, after sixteen years and a month before his 68th birthday.
His successor was not named for another nine months. The diocese’s own timeline records the sequence:
- 31 May 2025: Bishop Alan Smith’s last day in office
- 19 March 2026: 10 Downing Street announces at 10am that Andrew Rumsey is to be the next bishop, the nomination having been approved by the King
- 9 June 2026: the Confirmation of Election at St Mary-le-Bow in the City of London
- 19 September 2026: the installation at St Albans Cathedral
The date that matters legally is 9 June, not Saturday. A diocesan bishop takes office at the Confirmation of Election. That is 374 days after Bishop Alan stood down. From his last day to Saturday’s service was 476 days, close to sixteen months.
An installation is the public welcome rather than the appointment. It is the point at which the diocese and the city get to see the person already in post.
What happened at the doors
The ceremony keeps a set of old legal forms. The incoming bishop knocked on the west doors to ask for admission. The Archdeacon of Canterbury, standing in for the Archbishop of Canterbury, then placed him in the cathedra, the bishop’s chair that gives a cathedral its name.
The Dean of St Albans, the Very Revd Jo Kelly-Moore, handed him the diocesan crozier during the service. Outside beforehand there was live music from the Cameron Saint Trio and a local food stall, Emilio’s. Afterwards the diocese says 1,000 celebratory cupcakes were handed out in the Cathedral grounds.
Guests included His Majesty’s Lords-Lieutenant of Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, local MPs, High Sheriffs, visiting bishops, and ecumenical and interfaith representatives.
The Dean said the Cathedral’s tradition of welcome went back to its origins.
This Cathedral and Abbey Church is the mother church for Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Luton, and Barnet. Our history here began in Roman times with a simple act of welcome and shelter, when Alban, a local citizen, gave refuge to the fleeing priest Amphibalus.
A badge from an Easter Monday in 1979
Bishop Rumsey grew up in the diocese. He was born here, baptised at St Martin’s Church in Knebworth, and his father served as a parish priest in the diocese. He was Suffragan Bishop of Ramsbury in the Diocese of Salisbury from 2019, and remains the Church of England’s national lead bishop for church buildings.
In his sermon he produced a small brown envelope found in an old tin while packing up his home. It held badges from the St Albans Easter Monday Pilgrimage, the diocese dating the one he held up to 1979. He described the annual walk as one that had taken place “every Easter Monday since, I think, 1946”, and recalled young people converging on the Cathedral from across the diocese, some camping overnight in church halls.
Those badges, he said, planted “a Christianity that was alive”.
He went on to call the present “stony and thin-soiled times”, using the scorched grass of the summer drought as his image, and asked the diocese to “imagine your bit of the world differently” and to build on both “fresh planting and tenacious old roots”.
We don’t have to be any better or holier, any more or less religious than we are. But the hour is at hand in our land and in our lives, and we must get going.
The motto on the 1979 badge, and the title the diocese gave the published sermon, was “We’re on our way”.
Of the day itself he said it was “a poignant and powerful day for me, marking both a return home and a new beginning”.
What he now runs
The diocese is considerably larger than the city. It covers Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Barnet, including Luton and Bedford, and by its own count it has:
- more than 400 churches with over 20,000 regular attendees
- 20 deaneries across three archdeaconries, Bedford, Hertford and St Albans
- 137 Anglican church schools across six local authorities, including 32 academies
Most of those schools are primary. Six are secondary. They sit in Bedford Borough, Central Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Luton, Barnet and Buckinghamshire.
What it means for you
For most residents this changes nothing practical. There is no change to service times, to parish boundaries or to the running of church schools.
Two things are worth knowing.
First, the pilgrimage route the bishop walked the evening before is open to anyone. He began with Evening Prayer at St Mary’s Church in Redbourn, prayed at St Michael’s on the way, and finished at the Shrine of St Amphibalus in the Cathedral. The Cathedral’s St Amphibalus Way is a 5.5 mile walk from Redbourn to St Albans following the River Ver. It can be done in a day, there is a free route booklet, and a GPX file is available through the British Pilgrimage Trust. The route was funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Second, if you are planning to visit the Cathedral, it is a few minutes’ walk from the city centre and Verulamium Park. Check parking in St Albans before you drive in, and our St Albans train times to London page if you are travelling by rail. More ideas are on our things to do in St Albans page.
The bishop’s office is at 4 Abbey Mill Lane, St Albans AL3 4HD, and the diocese lists a contact number of 01727 853305, staffed 9am to 5pm.
Sources: Diocese of St Albans, Bishop Andrew’s welcome and installation (21 September 2026); Diocese of St Albans, “We’re on our way”, the installation sermon (21 September 2026); Diocese of St Albans, Next Bishop of St Albans; Diocese of St Albans, Retirement of the Bishop of St Albans (7 January 2025); Diocese of St Albans, Bishop of St Albans; Diocese of St Albans, Who and where we are; Diocese of St Albans, Schools in our Diocese; St Albans Cathedral, St Amphibalus Way.
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