Southwark Cathedral is delighted to announce the appointment of Helen Smee as the next Director of Music.

Helen is currently the Director of Frideswide Voices, the girls' choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. Helen also maintains a busy freelance career across the UK as a conductor and workshop leader.

Helen, a passionate advocate and campaigner for the role of women and girls in church music, grew up in East London and went on to study Music at the University of Cambridge, as Organ Scholar of Peterhouse. After her postgraduate studies with Patrick Russill at the Royal Academy of Music, she spent a decade in London as a freelance choral director working with youth choirs, chamber choirs, choral societies and music organisations across the UK, including the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain and the Royal School of Church Music. She was Director of Music at St Mary the Virgin, Merton Park for eleven years, and in 2014 co-founded the Voices of London Festival. Since moving to Christ Church, she has balanced Cathedral duties with a portfolio of other work, including running schools' singing events and outreach projects, teaching choral direction, and working with the chapel choirs of Hertford College, St Edmund Hall and Worcester College. As a writer and campaigner, her articles and interviews have featured in a range of publications, including most recently Choir and Organ and Cathedral Music magazine. In 2018 she won the Action for Children’s Arts Members’ Award in recognition of her outreach work with young people and was made an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music in 2022. 

The Very Rev’d Dr Mark Oakley, Dean of Southwark said: 'I am so delighted that Helen is joining us at Southwark Cathedral. She brings a very strong set of gifts with which to develop the profound ministry of our Choirs as they enrich our daily worship and perform widely to various audiences. Music is in the heart of the Cathedral, and we are delighted that Helen is full of energy and experience to direct the Choirs’ amazing skills that serve both our liturgy and our locality’.

Canon Kathryn Fleming, Precentor at Southwark Cathedral said: 'I am so looking forward to working with Helen, as together we seek to build on the foundations of excellence laid by the late Ian Keatley, so that our Music Department can best serve both the Cathedral and the wider Diocese. I’m especially excited that she joins us as our first woman Director of Music in the year we celebrate the 25^th anniversary of our Girls’ Choir. I’m confident that there will be much joy in our music making in the months to come'.

Helen said: "I am thrilled and honoured to be invited to join the Cathedral community at Southwark as Director of Music. As the first cathedral into which I ever stepped, it has long been a place which has inspired me, and I look forward with anticipation to making a contribution to its rich and vibrant communal life. I will be following in the footsteps of a great many distinguished and hard-working predecessors, and will strive to build on Southwark's rich musical history and forward-thinking outlook. It will, however, be deeply sad to leave Christ Church, and in particular the outstanding team of choristers, choir families, musicians, and teachers which make up the Frideswide Voices community - I look forward to watching their continued development and success in the years to come."

Helen will take up her new role in Southwark later in the year.