Gavin Ashenden lives partly in Shropshire and partly in Normandy.He grew up in S.W. London, and then Kent, and was educated at the King’s School in Canterbury. After originally reading Law at Bristol University, he found himself with a vocation to the priesthood.
He studied theology at Oak Hill Theological College in London, (while also spending a formative period at the Greek Orthodox Monastery of St John’s Tollehunt Knights.) He was ordained by + Mervyn Stockwood in Southwark Cathedral in 1980, and was appointed to a curacy in Bermondsey, a river side parish by the old London docks.
He spent the next ten years as a parish priest; as a curate at St James’, Bermondsey, and subsequently as a Vicar of a Church on a housing estate on the edge of South London.