Shadowlands

Matthew Green Faber £20 ★★★★★

As climate change redraws our coastlines, you wonder how recognisable future maps will be – after all, in the mesolithic period we were connected to continental Europe by Doggerland, ‘a vast plain of lakes, marshes, forest and woodland’. Civilisation appears entrenched but Britain’s shadow topography – lost cities, abandoned islands, swallowed settlements – reveals its fragility.

You probably need no reminding of this if you live in the Yorkshire village of Skipsea, possessed of northern Europe’s fastest eroding shoreline, or Welsh Fairbourne, a ‘ghost-town-in-waiting’ being slowly engulfed by waves. But the problem is urgent and widespread: 800 buildings in England and Wales could be under water in 20 years, and London by the close of this century.

Enter Matthew Green, author of London: A Travel Guide Through Time and a new book, Shadowlands, a poetic history of ‘ghost Britain’ – a subject as romantic as it is relevant. Green articulates both qualities in evocative prose that veers between loftily lyrical and drily humorous. His enthusiasm is infectious, which is just as well, for sometimes the detail feels exhaustive.

Nonetheless, Shadowlands is a fascinating journey through place and time, ‘loss and absence’. As Green roams expansively from Orkney’s buried neolithic houses of Skara Brae (above) to Suffolk’s drowned medieval city of Dunwich, from the evacuated Hebridean island of Hirta to the flooded Welsh village of Capel Celyn, he explores the factors that led to their demise and traces the evolution of community and culture. Perhaps most intriguing are the model villages of Norfolk’s Stanford Training Area, land requisitioned by the Army before the Second World War and controversially never returned.

It’s said we Britons love an underdog, and Shadowlands is a shrine to them,

‘the places that slipped through the fingers of history’. A local answer to

Cal Flyn’s bestselling Islands Of Abandonment, Green’s book offers ‘an awful premonition of what lies ahead’ and an elegiac resurrection of our past.