In the past few years, there has been quite a spate of books about our English churches: Peter Ross’s Steeple Chasing (2023), Andrew Ziminski’s Church Going (2024) and Luke Sherlock’s Forgotten Churches (2025). Now along comes Rachel Morley’s Church Crawling, a highly individual and illuminating exploration of our parish churches and the many stories they have to tell us.

Morley is a building conservator and church ‘rescuer’. She is also the director of Friends of Friendless Churches, an organisation that has done great work in repairing and reopening some of the country’s most neglected buildings. She cares deeply about our precious legacy of twelve thousand-plus parish churches, almost every one of which contains something of interest, and most of which have a great deal more to offer in terms of beauty, heritage, architecture and history. Morley is alive to all of this, and her book is not only learned and wide-­ranging but eloquent and heartfelt.

The term ‘church crawling’ was coined by John Betjeman in 1948 to describe his days spent visiting churches, poring over them and trying to capture their essence. Surprisingly, Church Crawling begins not with a typical English parish church, but with the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Hampshire, a small ‘Holy Box’