Alan Webster was Dean of Norwich, 1970-78, and of St Paul’s, 1978-87. He was a radical priest firmly rooted in the Church of England.

He spent the years 1942-46 as a curate in Sheffield under the quietly visionary leadership of Bishop Leslie Hunter, to whom he was always devoted. Webster’s life’s work was to be a development of the Hunter approach: the Church of England could be, and had to be, loved into new life so that it could be once again the moral and spiritual centre of the whole community; and one key to this process was the warmly human, imaginative and energetic parson, more concerned about the lay world than about ecclesiastical conventions.

Alan Brunskill Webster was born in 1918, the son of a clergyman. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Queen’s College, Oxford, and he prepared for ordination at Westcott House, Cambridge.

Though he was attracted to history – in 1954 he published a biography of Joshua Watson, the layman who galvanised and organised much of the revival of Anglican church life after the Napoleonic wars – Webster was too much the restless activist to be content with the academic life. His vocation was to be a clerical and more boldly innovative kind of Watson.

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He fulfilled this vocation partly by training other priests. He returned to Cambridge as vice-principal of Westcott House and was an enthusiastic teacher of ordinands at a time when there was considerable confidence that the reconstruction of Church and State would lead to a good future, together with an assurance that graduate priests would be accepted in the vanguard of progress. While he was at Westcott he met and married Margaret Falconer, who was then working for the Student Christian Movement. They formed a very strong partnership, especially in later years when Margaret became one of the leaders of the Movement for the Ordination of Women.

When Webster left Cambridge in 1953 it was in order to put his theories into practice as vicar of Barnard Castle, a country town in the diocese of Durham. Six years later his effective pastorate there was one of the reasons why he was appointed principal of Lincoln Theological College.

At Lincoln he was given scope to be creative in two courses which came to dominate his life – reconciliation with the Free Churches and the recognition of women. A college which had always had a distinguished staff but on a firmly Anglican basis, now found a Methodist teaching. The ethos of a men’s club, hitherto standard in seminaries, was also transformed by an active welcome not only to wives but also to women students.

Webster was not a creative theologian, but he was a friend and ally of radical thinkers such as Bishop Robinson, whose Honest to God therefore came as little surprise to this college in a cathedral city which on the face of it could be expected to be exposed to no winds other than those which blew over Lincolnshire.

This liveliness in the leadership of potential and actual clergy might have led to a bishopric, for example in Sheffield itself. But in 1970 Webster was invited to be Dean of Norwich.

He successfully switched his energy to that cathedral close, which is virtually an 18th-century village around a Norman monastery. He soon became a well-known figure in a diocese which was being shaken by changes with a rapidity not familiar to Norfolk – the drastic reduction in the number of isolated vicars under one bishop who was an enthusiast for teamwork, and an injection of doctrinally conservative but pastorally vigorous Evangelicalism. Webster’s own vision of the Church was different from Bishop Maurice Wood’s, and many in the diocese were grateful for the balance.

But his main interest lay in relating the Cathedral to the laity living near-by. He made the central Sunday service a friendly Eucharist and he welcomed into the ancient building any event which seemed likely to bring Church and people closer together. The worship made the Cathedral a “momentary monastery”, but the main Christian action took place outside and another of his phrases was that the Close must be “open”.

This meant being more open to tourists, for whom a visitors’ centre provided a restaurant, a shop and an exhibition; more open to those seeking truth, for whom a study centre housed many conferences; and more open to the poor. A “night shelter” for vagrants was opened in the teeth of the objection that Norwich had no social problems.

When it had overcome its surprise at this dynamism, Norfolk was grateful. Webster was helped particularly by the support of the Cathedral’s high steward, Sir Edmund Bacon. Some grumbles from the other clergy could be heard to the effect that they were not being consulted, but Webster’s impatient individualism became a problem only when he reluctantly accepted a call to become Dean of St Paul’s in 1978, incautiously describing himself as a new broom in the hearing of a more strong-minded set of clerical colleagues and a more powerfully conservative business community.

He remained in London’s greatest church for nine years of hard work. Despite controversies (sometimes bitter) behind the scenes, he did in St Paul’s what he had done in Norwich – but on a bigger scale. Regular congregations were large; tourists came in millions; all were welcomed with a human touch and, so far as was possible, made into pilgrims and friends; representatives of non-Anglican Churches were prominent on the great national occasions in the Cathedral such as the deliberately subdued service to mark the end of the Falklands conflict.

As chairman of the Deans’ and Provosts’ Conference, Webster saw his colleagues from all over the country beginning to work in the same pattern, making the Cathedrals the strongest and most attractive part of the Church of England’s public face. He was often asked for advice.

His outside interests and struggles were also on a new scale. With his wife he was in the forefront of the campaign to ordain women. His continuing concern for the poor now took him to Nicaragua or to meetings with neighbours in the City of London to promote the report about urban deprivation, Faith in the City. And his could be a critical voice as a church commissioner discussing the stewardship of assets. In the General Synod he was a spokesman for the Open Synod group, which although reluctant to see itself as a pressure group was in fact a liberal or radical alternative to Catholic or Evangelical conservatism.

It was not easy to humanise Wren’s architecture or to interest the top of the City of London in Latin America’s liberation theology, and as a member of the Crown Appointments Commission recommending men for diocesan bishoprics Webster may have asked himself whether he was in the right job. But he will be remembered not only as a forceful dean with strong convictions but also as a person of warmth and almost boyish zest at times. To the end he remained busy, always generous with his wisdom and his time, not least as a regular and valued contributor to the Faith page and the obituary columns of The Times.

He made his home a place of welcome to many. He was appointed KCVO in 1988, in which year he retired to Norfolk and a cottage at Cley next the Sea.

He is survived by his wife and their two sons and two daughters.

The Very Rev Alan Webster, KCVO, Dean of St Paul’s, 1978-87, was born on July 1, 1918. He died on September 2, 2007, aged 89