A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain

by Owen Hatherley

Overview

In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherley skewered New Labour’s architectural legacy in all its witless swagger. Now, in the year of the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, he sets out to describe what the Coalition’s altogether different approach to economic mismanagement and civic irresponsibility is doing to the places where the British live.

In a journey that begins and ends in the capital, Hatherley takes us from Plymouth and Brighton to Belfast and Aberdeen, by way of the eerie urbanism of the Welsh valleys and the much-mocked splendour of modernist Coventry. Everywhere outside the unreal Southeast, the building has stopped in towns and cities, which languish as they wait for the next bout of self-defeating austerity.

Hatherley writes with unrivalled aggression about the disarray of modern Britain, and yet this remains a book about possibilities remembered, about unlikely successes in the midst of seemingly inexorable failure. For as well as trash, ancient and modern, Hatherley finds signs of the hopeful country Britain once was and hints of what it might become.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781844679096
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	07/31/2012
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	434
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Owen Hatherley is the author of the acclaimed Militant Modernism, a defense of the modernist movement, and A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. He writes regularly on the political aesthetics of architecture, urbanism and popular culture for a variety of publications, including Building Design, Frieze, the Guardian and the New Statesman. He blogs on political aesthetics at nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Will There Still Be Building, in the Dark Times? xi

The Thames Gateway: One of the Dark Places of the Earth 1

Teesside: Infantilized Hercules 37

Preston: Nothing Great but Man 59

Barrow-In-Furness: Diving for Pearls 81

The Metropolitan Country of the West Midlands: The Patchwork Explains, the Land Is Unchanged 91

Briston: The Tyranny of Structurelessness 133

Brighton and Hove: On Parade 149

Croydon: Zone 5 Strategy 163

Plymouth: Fables of the Reconstruction 177

Oxford: Quadrangle and Banlieue 191

Leicester: Another Middle England 209

Lincoln: Between Two Cathedrals 225

The Vallelys: I Am a Pioneer, They Call Me Primitive 235

Edinburgh: Capital (It Fails Us Now) 249

Aberdeen: Where the Money Went 273

From Govan to Cumbernauld: Was the Solution Worse than the Problem? 285

Belfast: We are not Going Away 311

The City of London: The Beginning is Nigh 333

Acknowledgements 363

Notes 365

Index 367

Index of Places 377

Editorial Reviews

Fierce and original.”—Andy Beckett, Guardian

“[Hatherley is a] humanely barbed Nikolaus Pevsner for our times ... [His] book should be required reading for planners, developers, and architects.”—Jay Merrick, Independent

“He writes with venom and flare ... [It is] refreshing to see politics reintroduced to the architectural debate.”—Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times

“[A] bracing antidote to the faux-chumminess of so much British cultural discourse.”—Sukhdev Sandhu, Icon

“A timely counterpoint to Britain’s jubilee and Olympics self-congratulation ... observed with a precision and fury to force you to open your eyes.”—Ben Felsenburg, Metro

“Engaging, fearless and startlingly intelligent”—Time Out

From the Publisher