A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain [Paperback]

Review - "A guide to the new ruins of Great Britain" - Owen Hatherley.

It is a simple statement that the buildings around us are expressive of the period in which they were built, and reflect of the values and politics of that period.

That is as true of the smallest country cottage as it is of a Georgian terrace, or for a Victorian textile mill as it is of a grey logistics shed sited off an M6 slip road.

British political and economic history and the values of the powerful permeate our architecture - for good or ill. And history passes verdict, sometimes alarmingly quickly, on what is built.

Those verdicts too, are political. Hatherley is a unrepentant modernist. And his modernism is of the classic period of that genre. He is also a Socialist in the original sense of the term.

His target in this architectural round tour of British cities is a precise one - it is the built form which he describes as being part of the 'urban renaissance', in his words the streetscene of the government funded development of our cities under New Labour.

He describes accurately the ubiquitous lottery built centres, entertainment and cultural venues and shopping, hotel and eating complexes built round disused waterfronts, the 'gated' apartment flats, Academy schools, privatized council estates, areas of cities redesignated as 'quarters' and all topped off with generous lashings of public artworks.

He hates and loathes this environment, its blandness, its acceptance of the neo-liberal approach to building and architecture (best exemplified by the use of the Private Finance Initiative as a kickstart funder) and the anonymous, but tightly interlinked quangocracy of housing associations, Academy schools, 'partnership pathfinders', incorporated colleges and universities and the faceless, but tightly interlinked, regeneration boards that oversaw the growth of this new built form.

He travels around the nation to find the worst (and at times, to accept the best) of this world. Little of what he sees will, he believes will be of lasting social or historical importance

The book is modelled on JB Priestley's 1934 classic English Journey - although crucially, as we will see later, he also visits Scotland and Wales.

In the book he travels across the cities of our nation, starting, as did Priestley, from his native Southampton (which comes in for a particularly heavy kicking) to what he sees as 'the mausoleum of Blairism" in renovated Manchester, to the former Socialist Republic of Sheffield and to Newcastle, Glasgow and Cardiff.

No town really escapes. In Southampton he seems to find grace only in the remains of the railway hotel architecture of what was once Britain's premier port city, a waste incinerator and the 'Salt and Battery' chippie outside the main dock gates. In the once proud and self-confident Aldermanic cities of West Yorkshire he sees only desolation and newly built decay. The same is true of Manchester and Liverpool and, with some saving graces, Tyneside.

Interestingly it is in what we must now call the 'devolved provinces' that he finds some hope. In Glasgow there is much to decry but also room to hope. In part this is because this city probably had the worse possible modernist architectural start of any UK conurbation in the form of monolithic tower blocks and outer 'schemes' whose name still inspire mild panic attacks - Easterhouse, Castlemilk and Drumchapel. After this dire start, anything would be an improvement. Cardiff too, gets a generally good press, and is possibly the one city where the balance for Hatherley is in the positive. Whether this is because of the lingering feeling of 'otherness' from England, the distant echoes of the old Socialist traditions of Clydeside and the South Wales valleys or because of the birth of the new parliament and assembly is a debatable question, and one that perhaps only long term residents of these two cities can answer.

Where I have a problem with Hatherley is in what precisely is what he is 'for'. For a modernist, it seems odd that much of what he celebrates - like the Tenements of Glasgow's west end or the shopping arcades and the St Fagan's urban park of Cardiff are from a period that predates modernism entirely.

In terms of housing I know to my own regret (as a former Chairman of a planning committee) that what the public queue up for is not a modernist masterpiece or an 'experiment in living' but a Barratt box or detached houses that look like mini-me versions of Morticia's Castle. Within days of the developers receiving permission and erecting the show house and the sales kiosk, the deals are clinched.

Again, in terms of popularity for older buildings, the real passion is for the two key forms of mass housing that still cover our land - the by-law terraces of the late Victorian period and the semis and bungalows of inter-war suburbia. For proof of this, see the way urban communities sprang to arms to defend their terraced homes threatened by the 'pathfinder' demolition process in places like East Lancashire, Liverpool and Middlesbrough, or view the deluge of objections that descend on any development control office when any 'inappropriate' changes are contemplated for the arcadian groves of the 1930's.

But these reflections aside, 'A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain' is a sharply barbed, witty and argumentative read.

Owen Hatherley's pure unalloyed idealism is a bonus. True, a funny thing may have happened on the way to utopia, but the dissection of what this was can only be properly done by a Bolshevik Pevsner. It is done here.

David Walsh

A bit of a curate's egg this one. Hatherley is an entertaining writer but when I reach the end of a chapter, Im left with the impression that Ive read the thesis of an over-enthusiastic student, too eager to impress. This guy frequently uses five words when two would do; drops in the sort of references to other work which are a necessary part of an academia but not this; scatters -isms like confetti and generally seems to be aiming for an A grade in big words. HOWEVER, I confess to finding the book often difficult to put down well past my bed-time. Also, I have got to the end feeling rather disappointed that its all over. So much so that Ive ordered Militant Modernism here on Amazon.

Mind you, having ordered Militant Modernism, I am still grappling with the differences betweeen Hatherley's continual references to Modernism, Post-modernism, neo-modernism, post-punk modernism and pseudo-modernism.

I recommend it because, actually behind all the verbage, not only is he often right but he's persuasive. I like being persuaded.

Anyone buying this book should be aware of what they will get. The author is an unreconstructed sentimental socialist who seems to think we should all live in council high-rise flats and manufacture things, preferably out of iron. He spends a lot of space (perhaps too much) on Southampton, where he grew up, and Greenwich, where he lives. He thinks that buildings constructed of beton brut are not necessarily a blight on the landscape. He is (I think) very well informed about pop music. He requires you to know your Brutalism from your Constructivism. He quite likes Milton Keynes. His most insulting epithets are 'Thatcherite' and (even worse) 'Blairite'.

All this means that I would not have expected to like this book. But I did. I enjoy informed vituperation, and there's plenty of that. The author has a winning turn of phrase. He sees through the pretensions of (very) modern architects in a most refreshing way. As someone else has said, it's not clear what he actually favours, but he makes a devastating case against the buildings he homes in on. He is not hostile to good buildings from the past, such as Grainger and Dobson's Newcastle city centre, and the good bits of Liverpool.

I would actually have given the book five stars had it not been for the illustrations. I am afraid the photographs are unimpressive. A good book on architecture needs effective visuals, and the pictures here are small, muddy and printed on text paper, itself not very good. It's quite hard to tell what some of them represent. The book would have been even more effective if you had been able to see better pictures of what the author is criticising.