Room With A Pew

Bike-champing The English Countryside 

- Carlton Reid

“TRACE ME YOUR WHEEL-TRACKS, YOU fortunate bicycle,” wrote poet Sir John Betjeman in 1940. His focus wasn’t on that bicycle, but on Myfanwy, the person riding it. She was an amalgam of women he knew and wanted to bed (and generally later did). Britain’s official poet laureate had a thing for women on bicycles; in 1930, for a literary magazine, he perved, “I sometimes think that I should like/To be the saddle of a bike.”

But the sex- and cycling-crazed bard had another passion: English churches.

“Church crawling is the richest of all pleasures,” he wrote. “It leads you to the remotest and quietest country, it introduces you to the history of England in stone and wood and glass which is always truer than what you read in books.”

Oh, if only he could have bedded Myfanwy in a bucolic English church. Today, he could. He could go ‘champing,’ a mash-up of church and camping, which is a spinoff from ‘glamping,’ the portmanteau for glamorous camping. Some English country churches are now available for nightly hire—hallowed Airbnb, if you will.

Thousands of English churches lie abandoned, their parishioners dispersed (only 1.4 percent of Brits attend weekly services). Many of these historic places of worship are nestled in the most quintessentially English locations. A few have been converted into homes, or artists’ workshops, but 350 are looked after by the Churches Preservation Trust (CCT), 12 of which can now be booked as oversize stone tents.

Champing churches are open to the public during the day, but paying guests have the run of them at night, free to explore every nook and corner and freak out among the gravestones.