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The Shadowlands – A Visit to Britain’s Lost Towns

Historian Matthew Green takes the reader on a lyrical but completely immersive historical tour of Britain’s lost towns and villages. He takes us on a visit of eight, lost places, lost in completely different way, but not forgotten. Green has managed to untangle the stories of what became ill-fated places, including Winchelsea which was lost to the sea.

These places were lost for many various reasons for me the most striking story is that in Chapter eight, which he calls the Village of the Damned. That being the village of Capel Celyn in Wales, a village lost due to man’s need for water resources. While as an urban historian I have recently been looking at how Manchester gained its water from the Lake District and its disregard for the locals. This story is far more poignant as this removal of the people, the village is now under a water reservoir serving the people of England. How Green rebuilds the human stories and their fight is so striking and meaningful.

Just as striking is the removal of people from the island of St Kilda in 1930 even though these islands had been inhabited for over a thousand years. How in August 1930 the people were evacuated from the island, how they closed the public services, held their last church service before drowning their dogs of the only pier on the island. This being one of many stories of violence that appears throughout the book, not as glorification but mournful.

As in many stories of lost Britain there is always a story about Dunwich, the town that was built on a cliff in Suffolk before finally falling into the sea as the cliff collapsed. The story of the Church bell still being heard ringing today, is a fanciful story and always has been, but it is always a nice story to be reminded of.

Green has really examined the archives and dug deep to recover and tell those stories. This seems to be a work of passion, an immersive love and retelling of forgotten histories. But then that is part of the job of a historian, to retell stories sometimes forgotten by most and package them in the easiest form for none historians to absorb.

This is an excellent book written by a social and cultural historian that has brought all his training and skill to bear. ( )

A series of essays about a selection of British towns and villages abandoned due to economic change or lost to environmental changes (loss to the sea or changing river access). I found the book interesting, but too uneven in tone, insufficiently detailed and fragmented. I learned some fascinating facts, but was dissatisfied with the book as a whole.
Written by a historian, although at times the writing seemed to be more enthusiastic amateur, with the disadvantages that the book can veer off into purple prose (The top of the pines floated in the wind, lofty and conspiratorial, the faint paths pathetic against their might”), peppered with fragmented personal descriptions, reminiscences or suppositions (regularly using modifiers such as “likely”, “say”, “it is even possible”).
On the positive side the writing is often lively, anecdotal and easy to read, although sometimes the background research feels as if it has been transcribed into the book so as not to have been wasted.
To condense his exploration of these abandonments, Green necessarily simplifies his description of historic situations, which sometimes seemingly accept the determinism of hindsight, rather than the complexity and uncertainty of lived history. For example:
Fragmented into rival kingdoms, Wales, by 1066, was a very different cultural and political entity from the freshly conquered and already unified realm of England. England was not unified by 1066, although the Norman invaders wished to make it so, and its borders were still fluid with the Normans for years stamping out rebellions (and their successors waging territorial wars of expansion upon Scotland, Wales and Cornwall), but 1066 is a recognisable date.

The book discusses eight main sites, one from prehistory, four from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and three from the twentieth century, whilst providing numerous further examples:
1. Skara Brae - about 5,000 years ago, possibly lost climate change with flooding of adjacent hunting grounds
2. Trellech - 13th century iron making boom town on Welsh borders, reducing in size due to political change and the Black Death
3. Winchelsea - 13th century East Sussex port and town lost to the sea between about 1270 and 1288, now called Old Winchelsea to distinguish it from the new replacement Winchelsea town founded about three miles away by Edward I in the 1280’s. “It was the first major town in Britain to drown since the beginning of recorded history.” New Winchelsea becomes depopulated gradually from about 1350 as the estuary silts up and the wine trade, upon which its prosperity is founded, diverts to other ports.
4. Wharram Percy - deserted village - but also mentions Tilgarsley, deserted village north west of Eynsham, which was larger. Green traces the desertion as being precipitated by the Black Death in 1348, but the village then shrinking over the following 200 years, as more labour intensive arable farming was replaced by enclosure and sheep farming.
5. Dunwich - much lost to the sea from gradual coastal erosion after two “calamitous” sea storms in 1288 and 1328, including numerous ecclesiastical buildings and churches. Green references visits by Henry James (English Hours) and W G Sebald (The Rings of Saturn), as well as historical researches by Elizabethan writer Stow, who was commissioned by Day, whose early life was spent in Dunwich.
6. St Kilda in the Outer Hebrides - after perhaps 2,000 years of human occupation, the island was abandoned in 1930 due to depopulation (about 200 down to about 40) over the past 100 years or so, with discussion of the European Enlightenment and the idea of an ideal “primitive” man.
7. The villages of Breckland in Norfolk - requisitioned by the army in the 1940’s to allow training for the D-day landings, they were retained by the state and not returned to their owners, so that they could be used by the military to simulate Cold War Britain and Germany, Northern Ireland and Helmand Province.
8. Capel Celyn - a Welsh village drowned to provide a further source of water for the English city of Liverpool in the 1950’s.
A short Coda muses upon the ruination of the future, caused by climate change and economic conditions.

I received a Netgalley copy of this book, but this review is my honest opinion. ( )