Past Event: Shadowlands with Matthew Green

Drowned. Buried by sand. Decimated by plague. Plunged off a cliff. This is the forgotten history of Britain’s lost cities, ghost towns and vanished villages: our shadowlands.

Teeter on the brink of oblivion with historian Matthew Green as he introduces his new book, Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain. Hear the extraordinary stories of the spectral echoes, lost causes and dead ends of history that scar Britain’s landscape. These will include Dunwich, a medieval city plunged off the Suffolk coast; the lost Welsh city of Trellech, unearthed by moles; Skara Brae in Orkney, a neolithic village engulfed in sand; Wharram Percy, a village in North Yorkshire lost to the plague; Winchelsea in East Sussex, the medieval port twice destroyed by the sea; the abandoned Hebridean island of St Kilda; and Stanta, the Norfolk settlements lost to war games.

‘Shadowlands is so well researched, beautifully written and packed with interesting detail. Green is both historian and prophet, offering a warning we need to pay attention to . . . alarming and valuable.’ Claire Tomalin

‘A beautiful book, truly original. Shadowlands is poetic history written with great literary flair, inqusitiveness, soul-searching and humanity . . . It is a marvellous achievement.’ Ian Mortimer, author of The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England

‘An exquisitely written, moving and elegiac exploration . . . a book to savour and cherish.’ Suzannah Lipscomb

‘A haunting, lyrical tour around the lost places of Britain.’ Charlotte Higgins, author of Under Another Sky

‘A haunting and miraculous work of resurrection, stinging in a perpetual present’. Iain Sinclair, author of The Gold Machine

‘Superb. A beautifully written atlas of Ghost Britain, a summoning of places lost to memory, and a deft excavation of the void underlying myths of national identity.’ William Atkins, author of Exiles

Image credit: Hayley Benoit