A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain

By Owen Hatherley

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781844679096

Owen Hatherley

Owen Hatherley is an architecture and culture critic whose writings have spanned Soviet Constructivism, to the merits of Coventry train station. His acerbic wit and sense for 'place' can be found in the pages of Guardian and Architects Journal. He is the author of numerous books on architecture and culture, including The Chaplin Machine (Pluto Press, 2016), Trans-Europe Express (Penguin, 2017), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010) and Militant Modernism (Zero, 2009).

Reviews for A New Kind of Bleak

[ma_washigeri · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I don't often give 5 stars. This one gets it for a number of reasons. First it was written recently and I love the raw feel that comes because the writer is living in the same world and same 'interesting' times as I do. Secondly I hear a lifetime's passion for the built environment - way beyond me of course - he reads buildings with an insider's vocabulary and a feeling for the way it all happened that surely must come from living and working in the business for decades and not from learning about it second hand. Thirdly the anger. Very entertaining in the sense that you have to laugh or you would be crying forever, especially with our own town about to be gutted by the greedy developers. And lastly leaving me itching to get out there into the towns and cities with my eyes wide open to try and see for myself. I will never have the knowledge and experience to see places with the author's eyes but I am inspired to look around me in a new and richer way and even if I have to be angry at a lot of what I see it's not worth missing the experience.