Our Yasmin Turner sits down with Times best-selling author Matthew Green to hear all about his latest release...
Matthew Green is a historian and writer who has published historical features for The Guardian and the Financial Times, as well as appeared in documentaries for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. Following his first book London: A Travel Guide Through Time, last year he released another with the title Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain's Lost Cities and Vanished Villages.
Ahead of the launch of the paperback version - and his appearance at Five Leaves Bookshop here in Nottingham on Thursday 6 April - we chat with Matthew to hear more about the inspiration and writing process of Shadowlands, and what we can expect from the event in April…
Your most recent publication, Shadowlands, has been highly regarded. Can you tell us how the idea behind this came about? Why do you think lost history is important?
Often, with things like this, there is a pressure to find this moment that inspired it or some sort of epiphany. But in this case, it's actually true.
I was called to have a very tiny part in someone else’s history documentary, and we were just having a coffee with the producer. I’d just written a book about lost London, London: A Travel Guide Through Time, and I honestly didn’t have a clue what to do next.
The producer found it interesting that I had just released a book about the topic as they were making a film about a lost city, the drowned medieval city off the coast of Suffolk called Dunwich. This immediately piqued my curiosity because I didn't really realise there were lost cities in Britain.
So I went to this cliff and just stared out at where the city used to be, and felt this overwhelming sense of emptiness. It got me wondering whether there was more than one and whether that might be an interesting concept for a book.
The subtext was everything that was going on in the world around me. There was a sense of everything melting down and changing form. We had Brexit, Trump and the Coronavirus. All the certainties seemed to be shaken up and I began to think that, in time, the land mass in which we live might just be riddled with ghost towns and lost cities. It was that moment on the cliff, but also the wider context of what was going on in the world, that sparked the idea.
I went to this cliff and just stared out at where the city used to be, and felt this overwhelming sense of emptiness
How did you decide on which locations in the UK to focus on?
There are literally thousands out there, but I wanted each one to be something different. There’s one about the drowned medieval city of Old Winchelsea, and that’s very much a dramatic story of the waves taking entire streets off cliffs and into the sea.
Then there’s another one about Dunwich, but that’s more about how this lost city was reimagined and remembered, centuries after it had vanished. Other ones fell to different, what I call, mediums of oblivion. Sometimes it’s plague, sometimes it’s economic shifts or politics. Each one added something different, and I wanted it to be almost equal between England, Scotland and Wales. I wanted to do Ireland too, but I didn't quite get there.
It actually starts with Skara Brae, on Orkney, which is a 5000-year-old village that was buried in the sand. I also look at St. Kilda, which is the remotest part of Scotland, and there’s an amazing tale about a lost Welsh metropolis that was dug up by moles in the Forest of Dean.
I just did the ones that I found interesting to write about, and which haven't really been written about that much before. I also wanted to look at places that had collapsed inwards or entirely vanished, places that had failed and slipped through the fingers of history.
Was there any particular location that made the most lasting impression?
In terms of the spookiest, it was Capel Celyn, a Welsh-speaking village in North Wales that got drowned in many billions of tonnes of water because Liverpool wanted a new reservoir. I hopelessly misjudged how long it was going to take to walk there - I thought it would take about three hours, but it ended up taking around eight! I got stranded in the midst of this very serious thunderstorm, so there were sheets of lightning across this drowned village. I had to hitchhike back, and I didn’t forget that one in a hurry.
Shadowlands was meant to be written in a year but, in the end, it took about three years because there was so much research
Generally, in the news and media, there is more of a focus on larger international history and events. Are you hoping for a revival in interest towards local history? What do you want people to take away from the book?
Yes, to pay more attention to forgotten histories or untold histories is a trend which is really important. Black and British came out about ten years ago now, but it revealed the untold story of what it meant to be black and British from Roman times to the present day. My next project is queer history in Britain from the Stone Age to the present day. Again, this is a suppressed story.
You also write historical features for The Guardian and the Financial Times. How does the process of writing for this longer publication differ from that of writing shorter pieces?
You definitely get more invested - and it takes an awful lot longer. Shadowlands was meant to be written in a year but, in the end, it took about three years because there was so much research. If you flick through the footnotes, you can see that everything is meticulously referenced. A lot of these places also don’t exist any more, so it was harder than usual. You do become obsessed with it, it almost devours you. You’re completely absorbed in it for three years. You become very protective of your work.
What can people expect from the event at Five Leaves Bookshop?
It’s a chance to reveal more of the personal side of the book, and for the audience to reflect on things that they know. It’s also a visual feast - there’ll be plenty of glossy high-definition images. Hopefully it’ll be transportive, as well as immersive.
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