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Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Cities and Vanished Villages
Maybe someday
31
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
28/100Critics
35/100Scholars
Author:
Matthew Green
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Date:
July 19, 2022
Matthew Green, a British historian and broadcaster, travels across Britain to explore the haunting and often-beautiful remains of lost towns and cities as they teeter on the brink of oblivion.
What The Reviewers Say
It is this tantalizing sense of the almost-at-hand that informs the historian Matthew Green’s fascinating new tour of Britain’s lost towns and villages.
[Green] disinters their rich history and reimagines the lives of those who walked their streets, revealing 'tales of human perseverance, obsession, resistance and reconciliation'. By doing so, he makes tangible the tragedy of their loss and the threat we all face from the climate crisis on these storm-tossed islands.
By drawing on the slow erosion of places as remote as Orkney’s beehive-like community at Skara Brae, created before both Stonehenge and the Pyramids, Green uses the engulfing past to warn of future upheaval.
... not just a travelogue of scenic obsolescence. En route, the book offers us a gripping overview of humankind’s seemingly unstoppable evolution from primitive but harmless nomad to the rapacious bureaucrat in charge of civic planning in your neighborhood today.
