A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain

by OwenHatherley (Author)

Synopsis

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,A 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.A

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 400
Edition: Reprint
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 04 Jul 2011

ISBN 10: 1844677001
ISBN 13: 9781844677009

Media Reviews
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'.A Hari Kunzru, author of My Revolutions 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.A Jonathan Meades
Author Bio
Owen Hatherley is the author of the acclaimed Militant Modernism, a defense of the modernist movement. He writes on architecture, urbanism and popular culture for Building Design, Frieze, the Guardian and New Statesman. He blogs on political aesthetics at nastybrutalistandshort. blogspot.com. He lives in London.