In December 1943, 150 people in Imber, Wiltshire were given 47 days to pack and leave. The War Office called it temporary. The gates never reopened. Fifty miles south, Tyneham received identical orders the same month. Families pinned a note to the church door asking troops to treat their homes kindly. Both villages are military zones today, 80 years later.

Derwent and Ashopton in Derbyshire were demolished stone by stone between 1944 and 1945, then drowned beneath Ladybower Reservoir. When drought dropped the water 40 feet in 1976, the ruins surfaced. Stone walls stood waist-high in the mud. In 1965, Liverpool flooded Capel Celyn in Wales for a reservoir. Every Welsh MP voted against it. The bill passed anyway. Hallsands in Devon lost 29 houses to the sea in one night in 1917, after the Navy dredged 650,000 tons of shingle off the beach for concrete. St Kilda evacuated itself in 1930 because isolation had become fatal. The army returned in 1957 and built a radar station.

Stanford in Norfolk was requisitioned in 1942. Six villages, 750 residents, 30,000 acres. In 2004 a leaked document named Porton Down and field trials with simulant agents. Soil samples taken by descendants in 2004 showed trace organophosphates. The MoD disputed the findings and refused wider testing. Between 2010 and 2020, Britain lost 8,000 rural bus routes, 3,000 post offices, and 600 bank branches in villages under 3,000 population. Fairbourne in Wales has been given a decommissioning date of 2054 due to rising sea levels. Property values collapsed from $180,000 to $60,000 in three years. Coastal surveys have identified 23 other settlements on the same trajectory.