Shadowlands, Matthew Green
Shadowlands, Matthew Green
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Shadowlands
A Journey Through Britain's Lost Cities and Vanished Villages

Author: Matthew Green

Narrator: Matthew Green

Unabridged: 9 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/22/2022


Synopsis

Drowned. Buried by sand. Decimated by plague. Plunged off a cliff. This is the extraordinary tale of Britain's eerie and remarkable ghost towns and villages; shadowlands that once hummed with life.

Matthew Green, a British historian and broadcaster, tells the astonishing tales of the rise and demise of these places, animating the people who lived, worked, dreamed, and died there. Traveling across Britain to explore their haunting and often-beautiful remains, Green transports the listener to these lost towns and cities as they teeter on the brink of oblivion, vividly capturing the sounds of the sea clawing away row upon row of houses, the taste of medieval wine, or the sights of puffin hunting on the tallest cliffs in the country. We experience them in their prime, look on at their destruction, and revisit their lingering remains as they are mourned by evictees and reimagined by artists, writers, and mavericks.

A stunning and original excavation of Britain's untold history, Shadowlands gives us a truer sense of the progress and ravages of time, in a moment when many of our own settlements are threatened as never before.

About Matthew Green

Matthew Green is a historian and broadcaster with a doctorate from the University of Oxford. He writes for national newspapers, has appeared in many television documentaries, and is the author of Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain's Lost Cities and Vanished Villages and London: A Travel Guide Through Time. He lives in London.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bill on January 13, 2023

Eight terrific essays on the transience of all things, but especially the places people live -- towns, cities, islands. Green writes about eight locations in the British Isles depopulated by plague, war, training for war, tourism, greed, and rising oceans, and deftly draws parallels to the same curr......more

Goodreads review by Lesley on April 03, 2022

This book’s laudable aim is to question what we think we know about British history, by delving into places that were once hugely significant but that no longer exist. There’s such a huge current appetite for ‘lost’ everything in this country - London rivers, landscapes (Doggerland et al), rewilding......more

Goodreads review by Sherrie on January 08, 2023

I've been ploughing through this book for ages, well researched but a challenging read. I will dip into it again in the future.......more