Matthew Green first heard about Dunwich, the drowned medieval city off the Suffolk coast, in 2016 during a period of instability and “emotional turmoil” in his life, when his father died and his wife left him. “I was determined to discover how our country has come to be shaped by absences,” writes Green, “just as my life had come to be defined by what was no longer there.”
Dunwich, once a major port of 5,000 people and the capital city of Saxon East Anglia, fell victim to coastal erosion. Of its seven parish churches, All Saints was the last to succumb. Its tower collapsed into the sea, together with the cliff on which it was built, in 1922, “amid a waterfall of dead men’s bones on to the beach below”.
