This ‘society’ consists of an informal Facebook group with some 1,600 members. Anyone who shares the group’s passion for exploring places of worship and contributing photographs that inspire others to enjoy visiting such places can join.
Perhaps more people would be encouraged to do so if one could come up with a more attractive name. ‘Church crawling’ is John Betjeman’s phrase. He used it first in a BBC Home Service talk, broadcast on 21 July 1948, in which he said: ‘I know no greater pleasure than church crawling. You never know what you are going to find.’
Betjeman was a great phrase-maker, but this was not one of his best. He intended the term to echo the phrase ‘pub crawling’, but whereas one might be reduced to crawling if you become progressively more inebriated, crawling to church sounds penitential rather than joyous. It also has slightly sinister connotations, as if, like Kafka’s narrator in The Metamorphosis, we church lovers had woken up one day to find ourselves turned into insects. Worse still, it suggests an affinity with that pest, the deathwatch beetle, that has done so much damage by chomping away at the timbers of ancient church roofs.
