A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain
Back in 1997, New Labour came to power amid much talk of regenerating the inner cities left to rot under successive Conservative governments. Over the next decade, British cities became the laboratories of the new enterprise economy: glowing monuments to finance, property speculation, and the service industry—until the crash.
In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherley sets out to explore the wreckage—the buildings that epitomized an age of greed and aspiration. From Greenwich to Glasgow, Milton Keynes to Manchester, Hatherley maps the derelict Britain of the 2010s: from riverside apartment complexes, art galleries and amorphous interactive "centers," to shopping malls, call centers and factories turned into expensive lofts. In doing so, he provides a mordant commentary on the urban environment in which we live, work and consume. Scathing, forensic, bleakly humorous, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain is a coruscating autopsy of a get-rich-quick, aspirational politics, a brilliant, architectural "state we're in."
Hardback, 400 pages
ISBN: 9781844676514
November 2010
$29.95 / £17.99
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Reviews
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A book of finespun rage ... a book that had to be written. Wittily, bitterly, pithily, mostly accurately, Hatherley tells it how it is.
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This surgical evisceration of the cityscapes of Blairism is required reading.
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Wonderfully provocative.
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Hatherley is always entirely clear about his personal standpoint, so his criticisms never seem unjustified ... A rather bleak undercurrent is tempered by Hatherley’s often witty observations and easy-going prose style.
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This is a different kind of Heritage Britain, the kind that the tourists don't usually get to see ... this is also the real Britain, and Hatherley is the most informed, opinionated and acerbic guide you could wish for.
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Roomy and intellectually sophisticated.. It is bold and original, and it may change how you see British cities.
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This is fear and loathing in Lost Albion riffed by a quainter version of Hunter S Thompson.
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Painted with a raging energy that is exhilarating ... [It's] political, sinister, sometimes funny.
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A serious left-field attempt to provoke thought and argument ... This is an important book that is entirely worthy of the arguments it sets out to provoke.
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Hatherley deserves to be widely read … he has brought a welcome freshness and honesty to architectural criticsm.
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In this angry, fiercely funny book, Owen Hatherley steps forward as the Pevsner of the PFI generation, an erudite, urbane guide to the Ballardian wreckage of millennial Britain. Essential reading for anyone who ever feels their blood start to boil when they hear the word ‘regeneration.'
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An exhilarating book. Owen Hatherley brings to bear a quizzing eye, venomous wit, supple prose, refusal to curry favour, rejection of received ideas, exhaustive knowledge and all-round bolshiness.This book is as much a marker for an era as English Journey and Outrage were.
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The latest heir to Ruskin ... Hatherley blasts the architectural style of New Labour Britain. Whatever your pet-hate, Hatherley will probably have some enjoyably cruel words for it.
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A useful and entertaining guide to the state of our built environment .
Blog
Three Verso authors longlisted for the the Orwell Prize
The longlists for this year's Orwell Prize, Britain's most prestigious prize for political writing, were announced yesterday evening at a special event in London
Verso is delighted to have two books on the longlist for the book prize. Congratulations to John A. Hall (for Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography) and Owen Hatherley (for A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain), and also to Meltdown author, Paul Mason, who was longlisted for his blog on BBC Newsnight, Idle Scrawl.
Director of the prize, Jean Seaton, said about the nominated books: ‘These books show that political writing can be tender or chilling, furious or forensic, magisterial - or very funny. The whole range of political life is distilled into tremendous prose in these books.' In his commentary about the blogging prize, he suggests, ‘Blogging is evolving under our eyes, its purposes shifting. Public service watchdog? Clever reporting from new spaces in the political process? Telling it like it is in uncomfortable places? Different blogs are all of those and other things: it's an increasingly sophisticated world.'
The Modern City in Decay: PopMatters reviews A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain
Reviewing Owen Hatherley's acclaimed A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain for PopMatters, Alan Ashton-Smith is relieved that the book's inevitably somewhat "bleak undercurrent" is "tempered by Hatherley's often witty observations and easy-going prose style."
Ashton-Smith seems pleased by Hatherley's approach which
is twofold: he is concerned with both the architectural and the political. Accordingly, he attacks both the New Labour regeneration schemes that often failed and the frequently uninspired buildings that these schemes gave rise to.
And where the tone of the book is concerned—that inimitable wit and easy-going prose style combined with razor sharp criticisms—praise is also due:
Hatherley is always entirely clear about his personal standpoint, so his criticisms never seem unjustified. He is a socialist and a modernist. As such, he is very much an admirer of Le Corbusier's vision of the cities of tomorrow and a proponent of the social housing in which this vision has at times been partially manifested. Unfortunately, the council estates that draw on this kind of modernist influence, with their concrete edifices and labyrinthine walkways, are often considered to be failures, regarded as sites of crime and deprivation.
Andrew Saint reviews A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain for the Times Literary Supplement
Andrew Saint's review of A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain for the Times Literary Supplement has some nice things to say, and many criticisms.
For Saint, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain is
no true guidebook at all but a ranting, panting travelogue eked out with provocatively scruffy little photographs ... [Hatherley] doesn't say much that is perceptive because he doesn't really look. He is in much too much of a hurry to place them in cultural context, say something flip, move on and weave his slashing narrative. Haste is both this book's virtue and its vice. It gives it a vitality and immediacy, but does not make for mature criticism ... its instant and local value is enormous. It destroys shibboleths, and its anger, zest and articulacy make one think.
Saint also remarks on the author's "macho façade and ... semblance of hectic movement." Saint, the general editor of the Survey of London, part of English Heritage's Research Department, then attempts "to define the shape of Hatherley's cultural baggage"
Architecture for Hatherley must be hard, sincere, obtrusive, if possible outrageous, by preference connected to the puritan heyday of the welfare state ... Just as for Betjeman the supreme experience might be evensong in a Comper church menaced by an urban motorway, so for Hatherley it is wandering through the deserted Sheffield Markets with hard-rock tracks in his ears, or talking to ex-punks who remember the last days of Hulme.
The Times Literary Supplement website is "under construction." This review appears in the edition of Friday 28 January 2011.
Discussions
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A New Kind of Bleak
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