Please join us for a talk & discussion by Historian Dr Matthew Green as he delves into the forgotten history of Britain's lost cities, ghost towns and vanished villages: our shadowlands.

Hear the extraordinary stories of the lost causes, dead ends and false starts that scar Britain, places once so full of life now just spectral echoes rutted into the earth. These will include Dunwich, a mediaeval city plunged off a Suffolk cliff; the lost Welsh city of Trellech, unearthed by moles; Skara Brae in Orkney, a neolithic village engulfed in sand for 5,000 years; Wharram Percy, a village in North Yorkshire lost to the plague; Winchelsea in East Sussex, the mediaeval port twice destroyed by the sea; the abandoned Hebridean sea-mountain of St Kilda; and STANTA, the Norfolk settlements lost to war games.

Praise for Shadowlands

‘Green’s passion and historical vision bursts from the page, summoning up the past in surround sound and sensual prose.’ Cal Flyn, The Times

‘This is a beautifully written, intelligent book, and it is offered as a warning as well as a memorial.’ Sunday Times

‘If you’ve ever been captivated by the enigma of abandoned towns and villages … then this book is most definitely for you … poignant stories, evocatively told, that bring vanished worlds vividly to life.’ History Revealed

‘It is [the] tantalizing sense of the almost-at-hand that informs the historian Matthew Green’s fascinating new tour of Britain’s lost towns and villages.' TLS

‘A subject as romantic as it is relevant … Shadowlands is a fascinating journey through place and time, ‘loss and absence’.’ Mail on Sunday

Tickets are £5 per ticket (the value of which can be redeemed against a copy of Shadowlands at the event).