Hatherley

And Hatherley is also perceptive enough to spot the common ground, rarely acknowledged, between the postwar Britain of over-optimistic council estate construction and the post-Thatcher Britain of over-optimistic building for consumption.

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley – review Andy Beckett 2010

Hatherley is only 29, but his politics and aesthetic preferences are interestingly old-fashioned.

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley – review Andy Beckett 2010

Hatherley comes from a radical leftwing family, and is loyal, sometimes startlingly so, to the old socialist dreams of salvation through concrete and collective living.

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley – review Andy Beckett 2010

Hatherley grew up there, and quickly disarms anyone who suspects he is some sort of slumming middle-class aesthete, naively idealising council estates, by telling us that as a teenager he lived on one himself.

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley – review Andy Beckett 2010

Hatherley finds remnants of the latter all over the city: "elegant" 70s towerblocks, an angular 1966 stack of flats near the station that he calls "a glorious concrete Cunard".

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley – review Andy Beckett 2010

On the estate and in the city generally then, writes Hatherley, "the very fact that [many] spaces were unused ... led to a sense of possibility absent from the sewn-up, high-rent city of today".

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley – review Andy Beckett 2010

Central London, for example, with its new pedestrianised sections and cycle lanes, its expanding and ever more popular museums and galleries, its recently acquired confidence about how to use public spaces, is not somewhere Hatherley covers.

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley – review Andy Beckett 2010

Hatherley, who is a prolific architecture blogger, has a nice line in put-downs and sarcasm.

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley – review Andy Beckett 2010

Hatherley acidly contrasts it with the rundown but culturally vibrant Manchester of the late 70s: Regenerated cities produce no more great pop music, great films or great art than they do industrial product.

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley – review Andy Beckett 2010

At times its architecture and planning make Owen Hatherley despair.

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley – review Andy Beckett 2010