Abandoned Britain

Beneath the streets of London runs a railway that carried four million letters a day for seventy-six years and never a single passenger. It closed in 2003, and most people never knew it was there.

Abandoned Britain reveals 100 places, from the Outer Hebrides to the Kent coast, that were built, used and then simply stopped, and tells the surprising true story behind each one: who built it, why it mattered, and who decided it was no longer needed.

Inside, you will discover:

• Underground Britain: Aldwych and Down Street ghost stations, Mail Rail, Williamson's Tunnels, and the Chislehurst Caves, which sheltered fifteen thousand people a night during the Blitz and later hosted Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and Pink Floyd
• Cold War secrets: Burlington, the underground city beneath Corsham built for four thousand civil servants after a nuclear attack, plus Hack Green, Kelvedon Hatch, Orford Ness, Greenham Common and Churchill's secret Paddock bunker
• Lost villages: Tyneham and Imber, taken by the Army in 1943 on a promise of return that was never kept; Dunwich, a medieval town swallowed by the North Sea; St Kilda, whose last islanders left an open Bible in every house; and Capel Celyn, flooded for a Liverpool reservoir although not one Welsh MP voted in favour
• Industrial ruins: Battersea Power Station, Saltaire, Consett Steelworks, which was profitable in 1980 and closed anyway, and Tilbury, where the Empire Windrush docked in 1948
• Mansions and lost estates: Witley Court, Woodchester Mansion, where the stone carvers walked off the job in 1870 and the scaffolding holes are still open in the walls, and Clumber Park, the great ducal seat demolished on its owner's orders
• Strange and forgotten places: Sealand, the sea fort that declared itself a nation; Old Sarum, the empty hill that once sent two MPs to Parliament; and the Druids' Temple, a replica Stonehenge whose hired hermit lasted four and a half years of the seven required

This is not a ghost-hunting book or a collection of eerie legends. Every entry is drawn from official records, the National Archives, heritage listings and published histories, told in a few vivid pages and finished with what survives today. Many sites can still be visited, which makes this a companion for days out and road trips as much as a book for the armchair.

Spanning five thousand years, from Neolithic Skara Brae to the Cold War, it is perfect for lovers of British history, local history and hidden places, for urban explorers and walkers, and for anyone who has ever stopped at a boarded-up station or a roofless country house and wondered what happened there.

Nothing here was inevitable. Every place was closed, cleared, flooded or demolished by someone, for a reason. These are those reasons.