A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain

Owen Hatherley

List price £24.99

Product Details
Format:
Paperback / softback
ISBN:
9781844677009
Published:
01 Jul 2011
Publisher:
Verso Books
Dimensions:
400 pages - 211 x 142 x 33mm
Availability:
Available

Categories:

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."
Darkly humorous architectural guide to the decrepit new Britain that neoliberalism built.
Owen Hatherley was born in 1981. He writes regularly on architecture and cultural politics for Architects Journal, Architectural Review, Icon, Guardian, London Review of Books and New Humanist and is the author of several books.
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