Following the success of our fifth birthday weekend of events last summer we are back… bigger, better, and extended to a whole week of celebrations, as befits the shop – “Now We Are Six”. Full details on our Sixth page…
We’re thrilled to share some wonderful news…
The Holt Bookshop has received a major grant from Penguin Random House UK to launch a new children’s reading programme with the Holt Youth Project.
This autumn, we’ll be launching R.E.X. – Read, Examine, eXplore: a fun, creative reading programme for children aged 5–7 and 8–11.
With free books, themed activities, author visits and support from older youth mentors, R.E.X. is designed to help children discover the joy of reading — especially those who may not see themselves as “book club” readers.
We’re hugely grateful to Penguin Random House for supporting this project and delighted to be working with HYP to help make reading joyful, accessible and part of everyday life.
Church Crawling by Rachel Morley
We look forward to welcoming Rachel Morley to Holt on Wednesday 16th September at 7pm to talk about her new book, Church Crawling, appropriately in St Andrew’s.
A transporting and gloriously entertaining journey through the hidden lives of England’s rural parish churches – from building conservator and church ‘rescuer’ Rachel Morley
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 dusty village church, only to have 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.
Through their wall-paintings and monuments, their graffiti and plaques, their jumble of furniture and curios, Morley shows these buildings to be the expression of centuries of communal memory and folk culture – time capsules of connection to ancient and medieval ways of thinking, to revolutions and wars, to lives both glorious and humble. Along our journey we meet the Lincolnshire hermit who squeezed a devil from a man with his belt, the lovers struck by lightning before they could get married and the rope-sliding steeplejack who flew from a spire – before falling to his death. We discover the folk cure, ‘poor man’s aspirin’, and how it explains the gashes in church walls, we follow Victor Frankenstein into a charnel house to collect parts for his monster, and we learn how Thomas Hardy’s heart got eaten by a cat.
Too many of England’s fifteen thousand parish churches are now neglected and crumbling. Church Crawling helps us to see them for what they really are: places that thrum with the drama of life, and an incomparable treasure trove that offers as close an encounter with our past as it is possible to get.
Rachel Morley is a building conservator and Director of the Friends of Friendless Churches, which rescues, repairs and re-opens neglected old churches; under her direction the charity has saved twenty-seven of them. She has served as a judge for the John Betjeman Award for Church Conservation and Repair, and as Chair and Trustee of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
Tickets for this event will go on sale shortly. Email if you would like to rserve a ticket sales@holtbookshop.co.uk