It is 1957 /¿A Russian jet flies over Foulness Island. The photograph it takes starts a chain reaction, alarming London's military officials and unsettling the Essex farming community that endures within the island's barbed-wire enclosure. James arrives with orders to camouflage the secret base. Yet, despite Miss Bradshaw's efforts to help him restore order quickly and efficiently, secrets revealed by an abandoned printing press divert them both from the A-bomb threat to the cannons of the British Empire. Then a sudden death returns their attention to life, and the scrutiny of the outside world to Foulness Island. Weapons were tested here. Made better-made worse. Rockets refined over Thames sandbanks were turned on an Abyssinian mountain fortress. The British A-bomb transported to Aboriginal lands already devastated by colonial violence. Foulness traces the trajectory from the Victorian Empire to the Cold War.