A Civic Service for the Spirit of Imagination

On Sunday 28 April, St Bernadine's Catholic Church was filled with around 150 people to celebrate imagination in our town. It was a most uplifting event that Fr Roy, the parish priest and I were delighted to host. In the presence of the Town Mace, we were graced with presentations from three local 'imagineers' who talked of the role that imagination played in their lives. (David Hall's speech can be found here.) The voices of the Buckingham Children's Choir soared to the rafters as they sang a Million Dreams. And everyone sang favoured hymns ably supported by Derrick Matthews on the Church organ. Both Fr Roy and I addressed everyone with our thoughts on imagination and how it fits into the Bible and our Town. We celebrated all faiths and beliefs with a flower ceremony. It was wonderful to welcome The Lord Lieutenant, the Queen's local representative along with fellow Mayors from two neighbouring towns of Aylesbury and Leighton Linslade, and the Chair of AVDC.

Below are some pics, the order of service and the address I gave.

My thanks to everyone who helped make this service the success that it was. We managed to raise £400 for the Mayor's Charities and so I am hugely grateful for everyone's generosity as well! Fr Roy very kindly proposed that all the money went to the charities rather than splitting the money with his Church. That was very generous too!

Photos are from Cllr Warren Whyte, Deputy Town Clerk Claire Molyneux and Dean Jones, Partnerships and Outreach Manager UoB - thank you!

My civic address:

My term as Mayor of this glorious town is soon coming to a close. Julie and I have found our journey over the last two years delightful, intense, enjoyable and enthralling. And all the more so because of the ‘imagineers’ we have met during our travels around Buckingham and beyond.

As many of you here know, I set the theme of my first year as being about ambition. Over this last year, I have been focusing on imagination. Afterall, it is imagination which fuels ambition. It is imagination which makes the world a better place: every positive social change, every piece of technology, every artistic creation… started with someone daring to imagine a something better, something more beautiful, something more elegant.

For let us be crystal clear, as Albert Einstein famously said “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

Imagination encircles Buckingham too.

Over this last year we have met girl guides in their 70s and 80s who still dare to imagine a world in which everyone is serving others, doing their best, while learning and growing. Julie and I have shared in the excitement of sports women and sports men who dream of victory and achievement. We have seen new and beautiful buildings rise up from the mud to grace our town because someone had the idea to make it so.

We have seen students graduating with wide smiles as they finally realised their dreams. I have shared in the birthday celebrations of our local library which is a haven of imagination, a temple of dreams and a launchpad for new futures. We linked our town of imagination with the garden of ideas at Stowe with an historic promenade up to and through the Corinthian Arch. I spent evenings with some young carers learning about their hopes for their futures and that for the town.

Julie and I partook in a celebration of the heroic imaginations our town’s mighty women at the Old Gaol. And once again, we toured and wrapped the town in a journey of well-being, reflecting on what can be done to maintain and support good mental health.

The Christmas parade was a veritable feast of imagination. In this “world of fantasy”, people delighted in the colour and magic of fancy dress. It was a joy to behold and is a wonderful feature of our town.

We have been entranced by the imaginative spirit that bonds Buckingham with Mouvaux.

And of course, last year, we were greatly moved by all the commemorative events that reminded us of the sacrifices made one hundred years ago on the fields of Flanders and across Europe.

Naturally, I could go on with describing the many, many people, events and organisations we have met, experienced and visited over the last months. There is a deep stream of imagination, ambition, and hope that flows through our town and binds our community together. As the murdered MP, Jo Cox, now famously asserted in her maiden speech to Parliament: we always have far more in common than anything which might divide us. This is as true for the spirit of imagination as it is for the many other facets of our lives here in this thriving and magical river town.

Our river, the Great Ouse flows in and out of our town, symbolising the flow of our magnificent markets & shops, our bubbling businesses, our fluid learning, our effervescent ideas… and our unstoppable imagination.

But let us be clear: human imagination is simultaneously incredibly resilient and excruciatingly fragile.


It is our imagination that keeps us going when times are tough, sometimes very tough. Our imagination gives us hope, supports our faith and boosts our spirit even in times when we are struggling. Our imagination is like a golden sun, burning brightly inside of all of us, illuminating a path to the future.

But it is also oh so easy to allow ourselves to ignore our creative and imaginative spirits: to think that our imagination is just the floss and fluff of dreams and fanciful worlds. It is also frighteningly easy to crush someone else’s (a child’s maybe?) imagination with a swift and ill considered remark, or merely by not paying attention. Sometimes we scorn the imagineers around us, overlooking the fact that we are all imagineers, if we allow ourselves to be.

So let us today, and every day, celebrate our own spirit of imagination and look for it in others. And when we see it shining brightly, or indeed just shimmering in the background somewhere, let us all do what we can to help this light to grow and sparkle even more.

As the poet and author Alice Walker said “If you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.”

I feel so fortunate, and I know Julie does too, to have spent the last few months bathing in the brilliance of the verve and imagination of so many people. We have been charmed, stimulated and uplifted by our bountiful town. This is a great place in which to live, work, study, visit and play!

We are today in the middle of this Civic Service, in a place of worship and faith, and so I would like to highlight the link between imagination and the spiritual dimension of our town and all those here.

Faith is about hope. And hope turns into imagination. And imagination turns into action, which changes the world. Together we work for a world in which all live in peace, security, health and friendship. We dare to imagine such a world. Our deep wells of hope, faith and beliefs keep us daring to do so.

And it is at this point that the spiritual meets the civic and together work for our community in building an even more vibrant, safe and healthy Buckingham.


And this is what today is all about: reflecting on the spiritual in the civic and the civic in the spiritual. Let us all rejoice in the myriad of ways in which Buckingham people are using their imagination, determination and hope for a better world for everyone.

In this way, our Town will continue to be the very special place that it is: a place for amazing imagination and wonderful ambition.