Book 3 toppled – a history of loss, abandonment and absence

I have long had an interest in the history of our built landscape and especially what determined the location of towns and how we have changed how we move around our country. I like to read books about places and how they have changed through time. This is why I picked up Shadowlands by Matthew Green which I bought new quite some time ago and hadn’t yet got round to reading before I included it in this challenge.

In this book, however, the author tells us about our history and landscape by talking about places which no longer exist as thriving communities and can only be seen as ruins, if at all. He examines eight towns which were once thriving and which currently have no inhabitants. For each of them there is a reason for their disappearance or lack of population – economic change, destruction by sea erosion, depopulation due to plague, confiscation by the military for training soldiers, inundation due to the construction of a new dam and abandonment because of lack of sustainability. The author details the history of the towns/communities and describes why they disappeared.

This is a fascinating book, which is arranged in chronological order to show how the British have changed the use of our towns over the years. It draws some general conclusions from these specific examples about why towns might be abandoned and then projects this into the future to describe how our coastline might change with the advent of climate change. I had vaguely heard of a number of these sites but never thought about our disappearing built landscape before.

The author is careful to show that there are competing theories about why some sites were abandoned and he touches on some, not quite ethical, practices of archaeologists. He also tries to illustrate what he is saying with extracts from letters, newspapers and books to show us how the loss of these places affected ordinary people. He then describes what the sites look like now following his own visits to the places he writes about. I would, however, have liked a map of Britain to locate the places more easily and more photographs would have been nice.

This is a very interesting book for the casual reader, like myself. It’s not a travel book but really a history of place and peoples and as such I found it fascinating. I don’t keep a lot of books about places, mainly due to lack of shelf space, so I have decided to pass this one on to a new reader via my local Oxfam bookshop but I would be interested in reading more about some of these sites should I ever find a book about them which goes into more detail.