The Hubert Walter Award was presented in the Great Hall on 11 September and withdrawn on the 17th. Lambeth Palace's own list of 27 recipients still names him.
Lambeth Palace has withdrawn an award it presented in its own Great Hall six days earlier.
The Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation was given to Maulana Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi at a ceremony on Friday 11 September. On 17 September the palace confirmed it had taken the award back. The decision was published as a two-paragraph statement from Lambeth Palace on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s website.
The palace stands on the south bank of the Thames between Westminster Bridge and Lambeth Bridge, in north Lambeth, about two and a half miles from Clapham Common. It is the oldest working building in the borough and the London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
What the statement says
The statement sets out why the award was given in the first place. It was made, it says, “for Imam Ashrafi’s longstanding support for religious minorities in Pakistan, particularly the Christian community”, support “that is valued by many Christians in Pakistan including its Anglican Church”.
It then confirms the withdrawal:
It is a longstanding principle of interfaith dialogue and co-operation that we must engage with one another across deeply-held differences, and that remains the case. However, previous comments made by Imam Ashrafi have come to light that have led Lambeth Palace to reconsider this award and we can now confirm today that the award has been withdrawn.
The palace adds that it has contacted Imam Ashrafi to make him aware of the decision.
Three things the statement does not say:
- what the previous comments were
- when they were made
- who brought them to the palace’s attention
We are not reporting the wording of any earlier remarks, because Lambeth Palace has not identified which comments it acted on. As of today, Friday 19 September, the palace has published nothing further. Its news page carries no item after the 17 September statement.
The ceremony was in the Great Hall
The awards were presented in the Great Hall at Lambeth Palace on Friday 11 September. Twenty-seven people received one. The full list was published three days later, on 14 September.
They were the first Lambeth Awards presented by Sarah Mullally since she took office as Archbishop of Canterbury. Welcoming guests, she said the awards were “an opportunity to acknowledge that valuable work and those often unseen efforts of people determined to make a difference, determined to be hope in this world”.
The room itself is one of the oldest in Lambeth. The palace’s own guide to the rooms inside records that the Great Hall dates from the early 13th century, was demolished and sold off brick by brick during the Commonwealth, and was rebuilt by Archbishop William Juxon with an oak hammer-beam roof. It was destroyed again by an air raid in the Second World War. The palace gives the rebuild date as 1660 on that page and 1663 on its open days page.
We counted the 27 awards by category
The palace published the recipients as a single alphabetical list, without totals. We counted them against the five award categories it names.
- Canterbury Cross for Services to the Church of England: 12
- Lanfranc Award for Education and Scholarship: 5
- Cross of St Augustine for Services to the Anglican Communion: 4
- Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation: 4
- Langton Award for Community Service: 2
The palace’s own text confirms the figure of 12 for the Canterbury Cross. The other four counts are ours, taken from the published list.
The three other Hubert Walter recipients this year were the Reverend Elizabeth Carnelley, for her work on the Near Neighbours programme, Dr Barbara Schwepcke, and the late Reverend Dr Richard J Sudworth OBE.
Two awards went to palace staff who died in service
Two of the 27 were posthumous, and both went to people who worked at Lambeth Palace.
Dr Rachel Cosgrave was given the Lanfranc Award for Education and Scholarship for supporting scholars and researchers at Lambeth Palace Library for more than twenty years. The Reverend Dr Richard J Sudworth OBE, the Church of England’s National Inter-Religious Affairs Adviser, was given the Hubert Walter Award.
Lambeth Palace Library is a working research library in the borough, at 15 Lambeth Palace Road, SE1 7JT. Its reading room is open Monday to Friday and one Saturday a month, and readers register in advance (Lambeth Palace Library). The library has published nothing about the awards or the withdrawal.
The published list still names him
The withdrawal has not reached the recipient list.
Checked this afternoon, Friday 19 September, the palace’s 14 September news page still carries the line “Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, The Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation” in its full list of recipients. There is no note attached to it, and no correction on the page. That is two days after the withdrawal was confirmed.
When these nominations were made
One published detail explains how a nomination round and an archbishop can end up out of step.
The archbishop’s standing page on the awards records that nominations for the 2025 round closed on 30 November 2024, that there would be no awards in 2025, and that those nominations “will now be considered for 2026”. So the names presented in the Great Hall this month came from a round that shut to new nominations nearly two years ago, under the previous archbishop.
That page has been moved off the main site. It is still served in full from the section kept from the previous archbishop’s tenure, which is where the award definitions also sit. The Hubert Walter Award, it says, was first given in March 2016 and is named after Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1193 to 1205, “who had dialogue with non-Christians at a time of inter-faith conflict”. Its design carries a scarab beetle.
What it means for you
Nothing about the palace’s public opening has changed, and the practical position for people in Lambeth is narrow.
- The awards are the archbishop’s personal awards, administered at Lambeth Palace. They are not run by Lambeth Council and have no bearing on any council service.
- The next open day is Friday 25 September, hosted for the charity Arts for Dementia. The self-guided route includes the Great Hall, the State Rooms, the Guard Room and the Crypt Chapel. Tickets go through the charity, and the palace says the gardens are closed because of building works (tours and open days).
- Regular guided tours are suspended. The palace says it is recruiting volunteers and intends to resume them later in 2026.
- The library is open to readers now. Registration and booking are handled on the library’s own site, and it asks for at least two working days’ notice.
- Getting there: buses from Waterloo, Victoria and Vauxhall stop at the Lambeth Palace stop outside; the nearest tube stations are Lambeth North and Westminster. Our guide to Clapham tube and train times covers the local end of that journey, and Clapham roadworks and travel has this week’s closures.
- Both documents are short and public. The award announcement and the withdrawal statement can be read in a couple of minutes each.
We will update this page if Lambeth Palace says anything further, or if the published list of recipients changes.
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