Finding Beauty Behind Bars – Book Review
Finding Beauty Behind Bars – A Climate Activist’s Enforced Retreat, by Revd Tim Hewes (DLT, 2025, ISBN 978-1-917362-09-2)
Thanks to Peter Lippiert for this review. The brevity and beauty of this book make it an excellent Christmas present for friends and family.
Challenging, courageous, committed… all these characterise Tim Hewes’ vivid diary of six weeks in prison on remand, November-December 2022. Tim writes as ‘a priest and a grandfather’ – his platform for confronting the climate emergency as an activist, causing his sudden chaotic arrest at home one Sunday afternoon for ‘conspiracy to cause a public nuisance’, related to M25 activism.
His account is given an immediacy and urgency with daily diary accounts of prison life and his inner responses, printed on blue-lined ‘prison style’ paper, interspersed with thought-provoking pages of artwork by his artist wife Andrea.
We get uniquely first-hand insight into the ‘cacophony of men’ that is life in HMP Wormwood Scrubs and Wandsworth, with all its turmoil, uncertainty, randomness, violence and vulnerability. We read of the ‘indignities that come with loss of freedom’ and learn fascinating little details of prison life. Prison routine, drab food, the ubiquitous ‘vegan all-day breakfast’, cooking one-pot dishes more imaginatively in the cell kettle, vape capsules as currency, carrying belongings around in a sock (no pockets in prison trousers), inadequately-screened lavatories. Gangs and ‘spice’ ramp up the threat, and he’s grateful to be able to show an XR tattoo in the shower to prove his climate activism, when as a priest on Segregation Wing he’s suspected of being a ‘nonce’.
Early on a chaplain reminds Tim of the Desert Fathers’ ‘Your cell will teach you everything’, and he determines to use this as a place of learning. Physically restrained, he decides that his ‘mind is as free as a bird’, and intends to ‘squeeze as much goodness as I can from every day I’m here’. So he learns ‘to recognise beauty when I’m least expecting it – in the most unlikely places’. Wafts of music, a pied wagtail and some pigeons, cards sent him (well done, 7 year old Mia!), the unexpected kindness and professionalism of some prison officers. Radically, Tim discovers that ‘God is in this place’: he can discern ‘Bethel moments’.
He is sustained by others in ‘a community of resistance’ – by Andrea and his family, by cards and emails (how often are we writing to climate prisoners?), by Rebels In Prison Support, by his Bishop, by Joanna Macy’s Active Hope.
The climate crisis is ever-present but not laboured. In an appendix Tim prints the statement of mitigation he presented at another hearing while he was in prison, and for which he received an unconditional discharge. It makes brave, unarguable reading. This time he gets bail, and a tag. In March this year he was found Not Guilty at trial. His hope for this book is to ‘stimulate discussion about faith and the natural world, as well as the imperative of climate justice’. It will. With his Bishop, I’d agree ‘Thank you, that you have taken on this burden on behalf of the planet, society, of us all’.
Peter Lippiett
Both Tim Hewes and Peter Lippiert are members of Green Christian
To buy the book, please go here or order from your local bookstore.
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