Church Crawling

Every church tells a story. Churches have been at the centre of the English community since Christianity arrived on our shores with the Romans in the second century. They are palimpsests of human history and human emotion, containing layer upon layer of stories and secrets. The poet John Betjeman coined the phrase ‘church crawling’ to describe his days out visiting churches. In the spirit of Betjeman, Morley’s book captures the magical experience of poking around a deserted rural church only to see it transform – through her expert eyes – into a portal to the past, one that brings England’s people and history to life in the most colourful, moving and unexpected ways. What we discover is that churches are real survivors: they were smashed to bits in the Reformation, had their riches stripped during Cromwell’s puritanical purges, have been pulled apart to make new buildings every time there’s a new architectural fashion, and had bodies snatched from their graveyards to service the Victorian lust for scientific discovery. But still they stand, as witnesses of history. Church Crawling is an exploration of something so richly imbedded in English culture it’s hard to separate it from the national narrative of who we are and where we came from.