As one of the largest urban areas in the United Kingdom to be without city status, Reading has bid for city status on three recent occasions – in 2000 to celebrate the new millennium; in 2002 to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II; and 2012 to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee.
In 2002 he preached a sermon in which he condemned Nigel Dodds who accepted an invitation to attend an ecumenical service at St Anne's Cathedral, Belfast in celebration of Elizabeth II's golden jubilee.
On 4 June 2002, Queen Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee, the Metropolitan Police flagged down a Number 11 bus and used it as temporary transport for twenty-three peaceful anti-royalty demonstrators whom they had arrested after the demonstration, most of them in a nearby pub.
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Vickers was appointed Chairman of the Jubilee Walkway Trust in October 2002, which had been founded in 1977 as a lasting memory of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, and later refurbished and updated to commemorate her Golden Jubilee.