Underlands: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Landscape - Hardcover

'Expansive and enthusiastic, brimming with insights and extraordinary details, Underlands is a dispatch from the Deep Time of geology. In guiding you through the unseen world below us it delivers what the best books do: a transformation in perspective' --Gavin Francis

'I have been entirely won over by Ted Nield's manipulation of the subject and the genre. It is a most appealing thing that he has fashioned here full of great charm and humour. Geology is a noble instrument of inquiry and conviction. It can be oracular still, fiercely warning us against the degradation of our planet, and in the hands of Ted Nield it edges its way towards art' --Jan Morris, Literary Review

'Nield's book is a poetic remembrance of forgotten time and lost perspectives' --The Times

'Readers will be both informed and enchanted by Underlands, a personal memoir with an important scientific message' --Engineering and Technology

'Nield eloquently explores the foundations on which our cities have been built and the geological wonders that lie beneath us' --Mayfair Magazine

'Nield deftly incorporates a wide range of historical and literary references into his fluent prose, and relies on anecdotes - some very moving and others very amusing - to tell his stories. It all makes for a great read' --Geoscientist

'Nield eloquently explores the foundations on which our cities have been built and the geological wonders that lie beneath us' --Mayfair Magazine

'The ability to see the past and the future is both a blessing and a curse. I found that particularly strong testimony coming from someone who has spent a career in the oil industry' --Times Literary Supplement

'Nield eloquently explores the foundations on which our cities have been built and the geological wonders that lie beneath us' --Mayfair Magazine

Not so long ago, our roads, buildings, gravestones and monuments were built from local rock, our cities were powered by coal from Welsh mines, and our lamps were lit with paraffin from Scottish shale. At the height of the empire, British stone travelled across the world to India and China, Sri Lanka and Argentina, Singapore and South Africa. There were thousands of mines, quarries, slag heaps and brick pits across the British Isles. We live among the remnants of those times - our older cities are built from Bath limestone, or Aberdeen granite - but for the most part our mines are gone, our buildings are no longer local, and the flow of stone travels east to west. Spurred on by the erasure of history and industry, Ted Nield journeyed across this buried landscape: from the small Welsh village where his mining ancestors were born and died, to Swansea, Aberdeen, East Lothian, Surrey and Dorset. Delving into the history and geology of this forgotten Britain, and into his ancestors' connection with its rocks, Nield unearths the veins of coal, stone, oil, rock and clay that make up the country beneath our feet, exploring what the loss of kinship between past and present means for Britain and the rest of the world today.