Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain’s List Cities And Vanished Villages, by Matthew Green

This book would have been vastly better had the author not felt it necessary to give voice to groundless and politically motivated paranoid fears about anthropogenic climate change and its supposedly ravaging effects on future towns and cities. This book has quite enough material–most of it which reflects rather poorly on the various layers of English/British government–and does not need the distraction of an author talking about things that he does not know about. When the author is talking about the lost cities and vanished villages, there is a lot of worthwhile information here that shows how it is that towns simply get lost when their reason for being is taken away. A surprisingly large amount of these towns and villages fell apart due to some sort of incompetence or maliciousness relating to elites and government, and that is something that the reader will likely have a lot of cause to reflect upon. The author uses this book as an opportunity to tell a narrative about loss during Covid times, and the result is something that could have led to more soul searching on a part of the author himself.

Among the most poignant examples of loss discussed in this book are the ghost outposts of Norfolk, where in World War II the British government took the land of villagers in the area of Norfolk away from them in order to build places for war gaming. As one might expect if we assumed that the British government was made up of petty tyrants (a pretty easy conclusion to come to based on their characteristic behavior), we see that the land has never been returned and continues to be used to allow the British to cosplay themselves as military strategists of the highest order whenever there is a foreign crisis. One can imagine that right now the British are pretending the area is some kind of Eastern Ukrainian rural area in case the UK gets involved in the current war there, or perhaps a Sudanese wilderness or something of that nature. The example of the Welsh village flooded to provide more water to greedy Liverpool is also intensely infuriating as well, even if that particular example sparked what appears to have been a revival in Welsh identity that may be helpful to the long-term viability of the Welsh language and culture as a whole. There is a lot of loss in this book, and as the author was writing this book in the midst of a divorce, that sense of loss appears to have been pretty intentional.

In terms of its contents, this book is about 300 pages long and is divided into eight chapters. After illustrations, maps, and a short introduction, the author begins his story with an ancient Hebridean village called Skara Brae whose history and abandonment remains mysterious, largely because there are no texts to consult that explain why the city was abandoned or even how it was governed or organized (1). This is followed by a discussion of the brief history of Trellech, a town that was possibly a large one before its destruction in the Welsh rebellions led to its rapid abandonment that involved the decline of the De Clare family who ruled over the area (2). Next comes a discussion of a city that was obliterated twice, so to speak, Winchelsea, which was abandoned to the elements before being rebuilt and then abandoned a second time (3). The author then looks at Wharram Percy, a village that was abandoned during the plague when its rulers decided to base themselves elsewhere and enclose the village to increase their own profits and kick off the remaining peasants (4). A discussion of the city of Dunwich then follows, showing the destructiveness of the North Sea and giving the chance for the author to opine about supposed climate change (5). What follows is then a poignant discussion of the abandonment of St. Kilda, a village of austere-living Highland Scots (6) doomed by their poverty and remoteness. The ghost villages of Norfolk, confiscated by a tyrannical government, are then discussed by the author (7), who closes the main contents of the book with a discussion of the flooding of Capel Celyn in Wales for Liverpool’s water needs (8). The book then ends with a coda, acknowledgements, notes, and an index.