A Guide to the New Ruins of Great BritainBack 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.” |
Contents
1 | |
Milton Keynes Buckinghamshire Alphaville | 47 |
Nottingham The Banality of Aspiration | 63 |
Sheffield The Former Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire | 77 |
Manchester So Much to Answer For | 115 |
Tyneside From Brasilia to Baltic | 157 |
Glasgow Looking for the Future in All the Wrong Places | 183 |
Cambridge Silicon Fences | 217 |
Cardiff Manufacturing a Capital | 267 |
Greenwich Estuarine Enclaves | 283 |
Liverpool Exit | 331 |
Acknowledgements | 351 |
Notes | 353 |
359 | |
367 | |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic architects architecture attempt Beetham Tower Blairism Blairite brick bridge Britain British Brutalist building built Canary Wharf capital car parks Cardiff Castle Market central centre city’s civic cladding complex concrete council estates council housing create culture decade demolished derelict designed Eastleigh enclave English film flats futuristic Glasgow glass Gleadless Gleadless Valley green Greenwich Heritage huge Hulme iconic idea industrial Labour landscape Liverpool London look mall Manchester Manchester’s Millennium Milton Keynes Modernism Modernist mural Museum nearby neoliberalism Newcastle Nonetheless Nottingham office blocks ofits ofthe city Park Hill perhaps planned political port postmodernist postwar Pseudomodernism public art recent redevelopment regeneration retail road roofs Salford scheme seems Sheffield skyline slum Smith social socialist Solent City Southampton space station steel Stirling Prize streets style tenants tenements Thamesmead There’s thing tion tower blocks town Urban Renaissance Urban Splash vernacular Victorian Village walk walkways wall wasteland WestQuay Woolwich