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Artificial Islands: Adventures in the Dominions
Great Britain has just left one Union. But might the island’s future lie in another Union altogether, with its former colonial “kith and kin” in a trans-oceanic super-state with Canada, Australia and New Zealand?
Welcome to the strange world of the “CANZUK Union”, the name for a quixotic but apparently serious plan to reunify the white-majority “Dominions” of the British Empire under the flag of low taxes, strong borders and climate change denialism.
Artificial Islands tests this idea that Britain’s closest relations are in these three countries in North America and the South Pacific, through a thorough investigation of the townscapes and buildings of several cities within “CANZUK”. In this settler zone we can find some of the most purely modern landscapes in the world — British-designed cities that were built with extreme rapidity in forcibly seized territories on the other side of the world, created specifically to make the colonisers feel at home.
This book uncovers the secret histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British architecture in the Dominions — from Neo-Gothic cathedrals and parliaments, to rows of terraces and suburbs of semis, Edwardian baroque museums and classical war memorials, right up to post-war high-rise estates and Brutalist experiments.
Welcome to the strange world of the “CANZUK Union”, the name for a quixotic but apparently serious plan to reunify the white-majority “Dominions” of the British Empire under the flag of low taxes, strong borders and climate change denialism.
Artificial Islands tests this idea that Britain’s closest relations are in these three countries in North America and the South Pacific, through a thorough investigation of the townscapes and buildings of several cities within “CANZUK”. In this settler zone we can find some of the most purely modern landscapes in the world — British-designed cities that were built with extreme rapidity in forcibly seized territories on the other side of the world, created specifically to make the colonisers feel at home.
This book uncovers the secret histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British architecture in the Dominions — from Neo-Gothic cathedrals and parliaments, to rows of terraces and suburbs of semis, Edwardian baroque museums and classical war memorials, right up to post-war high-rise estates and Brutalist experiments.
345 pages, Paperback
First published August 9, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 17, 2024
I do enjoy Owen Hatherley's travelogues commenting acerbically on architecture while thoughtfully examining its political context. In this instalment, written during the covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, he reflects upon the British empire and brexit by examining six cities in the Dominions: two in each of New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. These three countries form the non-UK parts of the awkwardly termed CANZUK, an imaginary white anglophone trading bloc that some right-wing lobby groups fantasise can supplant the EU. Hatherley begins with a brief history of this originally Victorian concept, which fundamentally ignores the geographical locations of all countries concerned.
Subsequent chapters each examine a city's history of exterminating Indigenous people, evolving relationship with Britain, and architectural mimicry of other nations. As usual, I found his writing style informative and engaging, and appreciated the inclusion of photos. All the cities examined in Artificial Islands: Adventures in the Dominions are utterly unknown to me: I couldn't pinpoint any of them on a map and have never travelled outside Europe. I found the two in Canada, Ottawa and Montreal, most interesting. Admittedly, I was particularly ignorant about Canada having scarcely even read fiction set there. My prior knowledge of it was from Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Infinite Jest, and the 1990s TV series Due South. Montreal sounds like a genuinely fascinating place, as its climate is so extreme that there is a whole contiguous section of the city underground:
According to wikipedia, Montreal's record low is -37.8°C (-49.1 with windchill!) and record high 37.6°C. Hatherley visited in January and likens the temperature to Novosibirsk. He is nonetheless pretty enthusiastic about the city, as its planning and architecture are by far the most interesting and distinctive of the six case studies. It is the least in thrall to Britain architecturally, and also politically:
Auckland, on the other hand, doesn't come off well at all. I was shocked by the low density of housing in both the Australian and New Zealand cities, which seems like a wildly profligate use of space. Hatherley's idiosyncratic tour concludes by pointing out there is no good reason why Canada, New Zealand, and Australia would want to go back to being junior partners in a UK-led trade bloc. CANZUK is mere brexiteer fantasy. Nonetheless, learning more about the political and architectural history of Dominions with the privilege of being majority white and anglophone is fascinating and valuable. It's particularly striking that in Victorian and Edwardian times labour and franchise rights went further, faster in these nations than in Britain - but for settlers only. Such rights were denied to the remaining Indigenous people who'd survived attempts at genocide until much later in the twentieth century.
Hatherley's books all assume that spatial planning and major buildings inscribe a place's politics onto space, so that we can read the latter from the former. He is also opinionated and waspishly judgemental about architectural aesthetics. I find this combination appealing enough that this is the seventh book of his that I've read and enjoyed.
Subsequent chapters each examine a city's history of exterminating Indigenous people, evolving relationship with Britain, and architectural mimicry of other nations. As usual, I found his writing style informative and engaging, and appreciated the inclusion of photos. All the cities examined in Artificial Islands: Adventures in the Dominions are utterly unknown to me: I couldn't pinpoint any of them on a map and have never travelled outside Europe. I found the two in Canada, Ottawa and Montreal, most interesting. Admittedly, I was particularly ignorant about Canada having scarcely even read fiction set there. My prior knowledge of it was from Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Infinite Jest, and the 1990s TV series Due South. Montreal sounds like a genuinely fascinating place, as its climate is so extreme that there is a whole contiguous section of the city underground:
The important thing about all of this, as Banham noticed at Place Alexis-Nihon in the 1970s, is that it proves how 'some sort of full civic life could be seem to be lived in totally artificial environments', something which contradicted the ideology - which has dominated urbanism since Jane Jacobs - that only a pedestrian street on a real ground level can provide an enjoyable street life. Montreal shows that you can have it in three dimensions: overground, underground, wombling free.
According to wikipedia, Montreal's record low is -37.8°C (-49.1 with windchill!) and record high 37.6°C. Hatherley visited in January and likens the temperature to Novosibirsk. He is nonetheless pretty enthusiastic about the city, as its planning and architecture are by far the most interesting and distinctive of the six case studies. It is the least in thrall to Britain architecturally, and also politically:
I found this an immensely comfortable city, no matter how much it exults in the alien, the artificial, and the gigantic - or rather, because of that.
This too, obviously, is a colonial situation. If you take the view - a little essentialising and patronising, to be sure, but containing some truth when compared with the settler situation - that Indigenious people have had a particularly respectful and non-alienated relationship with the land they've farmed and pastured upon, then Montreal is the exact opposite, a city which has taken alienation and run with it, a settlement that is so ill-suited in the place it has been built that it has had to pour enormous quantities of concrete to make it hospitable. It is a matter of personal taste, perhaps, that I find this so much more interesting to walk around than somewhere that has either (as is common in the north of the USA or the former USSR) decided to leave its frozen centre purely to cars driving from mall to workplace to housing and back, and also so much more interesting than those places in Canada and the Antipodes which had no better idea for how to relate to their new environment than to offload what the settlers had already brought with them, latterly scattered with a few corporate headquarters. In burrowing into the purest artificiality, this place feels much less like a contrivance than those miniaturised Englands and Scotlands, but rather itself, a phenomenon that could happen only in this particular place. But as the environment becomes more and more drastically inhospitable, this form of ultra-alienated city, where you avoid the surface and the open air for fear of death, could start to become the norm in the rich world.
Auckland, on the other hand, doesn't come off well at all. I was shocked by the low density of housing in both the Australian and New Zealand cities, which seems like a wildly profligate use of space. Hatherley's idiosyncratic tour concludes by pointing out there is no good reason why Canada, New Zealand, and Australia would want to go back to being junior partners in a UK-led trade bloc. CANZUK is mere brexiteer fantasy. Nonetheless, learning more about the political and architectural history of Dominions with the privilege of being majority white and anglophone is fascinating and valuable. It's particularly striking that in Victorian and Edwardian times labour and franchise rights went further, faster in these nations than in Britain - but for settlers only. Such rights were denied to the remaining Indigenous people who'd survived attempts at genocide until much later in the twentieth century.
Hatherley's books all assume that spatial planning and major buildings inscribe a place's politics onto space, so that we can read the latter from the former. He is also opinionated and waspishly judgemental about architectural aesthetics. I find this combination appealing enough that this is the seventh book of his that I've read and enjoyed.
October 12, 2024
It’s good to see Hatherley stretching his legs and taking his ever inquisitive eye beyond his usual European territory and tackling some new realms in some of the former British colonies. He’s clearly done his research and appears to have at least a fundamental grounding on his new subjects, and there’s a generous and effective distribution of photos which gives greater depth and meaning to the text, for those who will be unfamiliar with the many buildings in question.
This has a surprisingly long though intriguing introduction before starting off with a really informed and well-rounded account of Melbourne. He comes up with a refreshing summary of those ridiculous “most liveable cities” lists that certain publications love to come up with. He believes, “So what “liveability” really means, it seems, is a little dash of neoliberalism- “ease of doing business”, super-fast wi-fi and no “corruption” – combined with a reasonably fair state.”
Hatherley’s take on NZ’s two biggest cities were hugely refreshing, the problem with the vast majority of foreign travel writers or other accounts of Aotearoa tend to lapse into the usual tired, old gushing clichés about the scenery, so it was good to see such a brutally honest assessment of the sub-standard infrastructure and architecture, compared to most of its peers. But it’s his description of Auckland (a city I have a lot of love for) which really hit the nail on the head and had me laughing in recognition – “Why Auckland is considered liveable, on the other hand, is something that puzzled me immensely in my two weeks in the city, and is a mystery that still puzzles me years later.” He describes the National War Memorial as “not just inept, it’s grotesque.” He later adds that it, “boasts probably the most ugly, baffling and outright nasty built environment of any large city I have ever visited.”
I was sold on what he said about Montreal, describing the Place-des-Arts station as “somewhere between German Expression of the 1910s, Penguin book cover illustrations of the 1950s and Socialist Realism of the 1930s.” The Habitat 67 building, also caught my eye, a quite extraordinary complex, a Metabolist curiosity/puzzle, built for and a legacy of, the highly successful Expo 67. This book ends in the rather unassuming, yet strangely appropriate location of the Shetland Islands, tying it all up quite nicely.
I wonder if he has a follow-up in mind?...I would like to have seen him go deeper into his subject and read his take on the likes of Sydney in particular. And I’m sure he would have plenty more to say on the likes of Christchurch, Dunedin, Napier and even Oamaru?...
August 30, 2025
Delightful, astute, original, scathing, and genuinely funny from start to finish. Owen Hatherley continues to excel in the genre he sort-of invented: part-travelogue and part-critical theory architectural writing. As usual, his dissection of the relationship between working-class politics and the built environment is illuminating.
Hatherley’s central idea is that the cityscapes of the “white dominions” of the British Empire failed to develop truly modern architectures that suited the place and time they were in, because the aim was to reproduce a sense of Britishness and its historicity (not just the lovely Victorian and Gothic parts, but increasingly a hostility to planning and public transit). Combined with the lack of a European aristocracy to canonise proper notions of good and bad taste, the architecture in cities like Melbourne, Auckland, and Ottowa is marked by both a sense of the kitsch/pastiche and the slightly eerie. See: Ottowa’s ghastly nation building style, “baronial-chateau”. Praise is singled out for Montreal, which embarked on a process of modernism at a breakneck speed in the 60s and 70s (coinciding with their de-Anglicisation). But don’t get the idea that Hatherley is merely a bitter snob, as he writes about these places with the amount of affection that it usually takes to write about a subject well.
Sad to see this book didn’t get the discussion and attention it deserved upon release. I fear it got buried under the weight of Covid.
Hatherley’s central idea is that the cityscapes of the “white dominions” of the British Empire failed to develop truly modern architectures that suited the place and time they were in, because the aim was to reproduce a sense of Britishness and its historicity (not just the lovely Victorian and Gothic parts, but increasingly a hostility to planning and public transit). Combined with the lack of a European aristocracy to canonise proper notions of good and bad taste, the architecture in cities like Melbourne, Auckland, and Ottowa is marked by both a sense of the kitsch/pastiche and the slightly eerie. See: Ottowa’s ghastly nation building style, “baronial-chateau”. Praise is singled out for Montreal, which embarked on a process of modernism at a breakneck speed in the 60s and 70s (coinciding with their de-Anglicisation). But don’t get the idea that Hatherley is merely a bitter snob, as he writes about these places with the amount of affection that it usually takes to write about a subject well.
Sad to see this book didn’t get the discussion and attention it deserved upon release. I fear it got buried under the weight of Covid.
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October 1, 2023Well now I need to go to Montréal
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews