I have been a feature writer for newspapers and magazines for nearly 40 years and have come to specialise in articles on all aspects of ‘Englishness’ from village lockups to holy wells to why we drive on the left hand side of the road. My prime passion is buildings – usually old ones, and in recent years I have written extensively for Listed Heritage magazine.

In the past my columns for Homebuilding and Renovating magazine tended to concentrated on the thought, ingenuity and detailed planning that go into the best self-build projects – really individual new homes. The range wa wide – from converted windmills and cowsheds to inspired new structures, the products of leading architects and designers, on prime sites. Self-build is one of the things the British excel at, so the theme that runs through all my work remains fairly constant. Another thing that characterises the British is that we are a nation of small businesses. In the Nineties I wrote many of the articles in the long-running series profiling small businesses – Minding Your Own Business – in the Weekend Section of the Financial Times.

Some of the articles I have written can be viewed using the link below.

Articles by Clive Fewins – from 1994 to the present

Another thing that we ‘do’ really well in this country is parish churches. As a collection they are unsurpassed in any other European country. Again, old ones give me the greatest delight, but that is not to discount the small number of really good new ones that have been built in the past 30 years. By the early 1990s I was already a seasoned ‘church crawler’, with the eventual aim of visiting all 10,000 or so medieval parish churches in England and Wales. It was at that point that it struck me that this was a pastime that must be of some appeal to young people. ‘Be a Church Detective’ is aimed at 8–14 year-olds. It is still in print and has gone through several editions. The latest appeared in the Spring of 1995. In the same year I produced a second, far more adventurous, book on parish churches, The Church Explorer’s Handbook. It is aimed at the general reader who has always had an interest in our parish churches. It is pocket-sized and designed to be taken with you on your travels round this country. In his Foreword Andrew Lloyd Webber describes it as a book designed to enable future millions of parish church visitors to enjoy and better understand what they are looking at.

My latest book is Life under Lockdown – a (not too serious) diary in verse, March–July 20, published in November 2020. It is a pocket–sized illustrated hardback book of poems, produced to raise funds for the NHS Charities Together Covid 19 Appeal. An ideal present book.

For further details of these books and how to get hold of them use the link below.

Books by Clive Fewins – 1992, 2005 and 2020

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