A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain

by Owen Hatherley

Darkly humorous architectural guide to the decrepit new Britain that neoliberalism built.

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction, Politics, Urbanism, British Literature, Cities, History

369 pages, Hardcover

First published October 4, 2010

About the author

Writer and editor

Reviews

[Timothy Urban · Rating 4 out of 5]

Without hesitation I give this book a high score. It really skewers all that is awful about recent building in Britain. And it's very funny too. You have to know a little about movements in modern achitecture - a little research before you start would pay dividends.



Essentially, this was the approach to planning under New Labour...



No one is buying our yuppie flats!! Maybe because there aren't enough Tesco metros in a 200 yard radius? No, here's an idea, demolish all the council housing, then it's either join the 50,000 others on the council waiting list or rent one of our shoddy little aspirational cardboard condos. You get a Mediterranean-style balcony! With a panoramic view of a traffic jam!



It almost feels like Hatherley is picking Britain Apart building by building as he names and shames the crap people behind our Crap Towns. Might come back and give this a full five out of five.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very enjoyable tour of British architecture. It was possibly pitched a little above my knowledge level in that area, but I thought concepts were explained very clearly - it's only some of the references and names that I struggled with. I was also slightly hampered by unfamiliarity with most of the cities discussed, but those that I've been to for any real period of time (Wakefield, Leeds, Cardiff and Greenwich's Millennium Village) were nailed so completely that I can't really doubt the accuracy of the rest of Hatherley's sketches!

Inevitably, though, there is a longing to know what he would make of areas with which I'm more familiar - the towns of Kent, the suburbs of south-west London, and of course Croydon. To some extent, this book does give the tools to try and understand other areas. Nevertheless, one of the enduring messages that I took from the book is that making judgements on architecture is hard - harder than setting up an Instagram account of looking approvingly at Brutalist structures. One of Hatherley's strengths is finding the good in buildings you might expect him to detest, and admitting the bad in those you might think he'd glorify. The book does not give firm answers about what British architecture should look like, but it poses the necessary questions and provides an immaculate excavation of its ruins.

[Rory Mcclenaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Owen Hatherley is very funny when he's angry and he's pretty annoyed about modern Britain. I didn't expect to snigger out loud when reading a book about architecture, but it happened more than once.

A fun game to play while reading this book is to skip ahead in the chapter, look at the pictures of the buildings and see whether you think the author will like them or not. My success rate was no more than 50% as I can't claim to love concrete quite as much as he does. Whether I agree with him or not doesn't really matter anyway, as the great thing about his writing is that it's made me look at and think about architecture in a way I never did before.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a little like H V Morton & J B Priestly meet Nicholas Pevsner – and that's a good thing. Hatherley has an excellent eye for urban design, architecture and the ways that both are framed and shaped by existing political cultures: in other words, this architectural travelogue of contemporary Britain finds much to respect, more to condemn, and a neo-liberal, New Labour Blairite project to hold responsible. Knowing a little about recent developments in architectural practice and debates and about current tendencies in urban design is helpful (but far from required), having some understanding of the cities in question helps more.

Hatherley finds little to see as likely-to-last in the British cities he visits (but then we also don't see the things that don't survive), hence the title – The New Ruins of Britain. He sees (quite properly) mediocre tat (think Salford Docks), pretensions (oh, Salford Docks again – especially the Imperial War Museum North), and architectural dullness as cities are reproduced in close to identikit forms with a view to being the cultural powerhouses of their local and national economies but are tedious places of fear and "the collective pursuit of the private life" – as Lewis Mumford once called suburbia. When read alongside regular publications as the New Economics Foundation's lists of the UK's identikit High Streets we are reminded just how un-urban Britain's cities are and are becoming.

In short, this is a great read that has, perversely, encouraged me to spend more time in Leeds, Sheffield, Glasgow and Greenwich (but not, I hasten to add, Southampton!). My major gripe is the fairly low production standards – the fairly loose weave paper is fine but when combined with the small format black and white photos, those photos add little to the overall success of the book.

[Chasquis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Someone, somewhere must like concrete as a building material. Here's a fact, WWII bunkers tend to self destruct when the steel reinforcements rust, causing the surface to fall off or 'spall'. Mixing the material with sea water aided and abetted this phenomenon.
Owen Hatherley is more interested in buildings that barely lasted long enough to auto destruct. My problem with his racy and highly entertaining travelogue, starting in Southampton, is lack of pictures, or at least the small size of the b/w thumbnails scattered amongst the text.
Is there a hardback edition, quarter calf with fine gold tooling and glossy halftones? I doubt it. It's all too throwaway, in both content and style, to be bound in anything longer lasting than an Arndale Centre set in a regeneration scheme, yet somehow left unfinished. Should you be a lover of fine architecture, green thoughts in a green shade, and that sort of thing, this is a must read, a warning to the curious and a 'how not to do it.' At least that's what I came away with, but I have walked through Anglia Square in Norwich clutching a company laptop and lived to tell the tale.
Brutalism does not invite one to gaze lingeringly at it but rather the fleeting glimpse through dust damaged tear ducts and then out the other side ASAP IMHO....4 stars for distances covered, research on the ground and coverage of the covered (and uncovered) walkways leading nowhere that most people have ignored....until now.

[Pete Trewin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't agree with everything that Owen Hatherley says, eg his liking for Jonathan Meades and architectural brutalism, but if you care about the urban environment and feel that what is happening is wrong then this is the book for you. I must admit that I felt a little guilty reading this. I was a planner and a regeneration consultant until recently and I'm afraid I went along with the 'design and build' thing which has resulted in the eerie feeling that you get going around the country and visiting cities that you could be anywhere. He is dead right about the pathfinder scheme which has resulted in the Welsh Streets fiasco in Liverpool. He is great on the history of planning and politics in Liverpool (the city I know well)and makes some telling points eg that the recent Liverpool One development is very successful in terms of urban design but that it is designed for customers from Cheshire rather than Bootle. Im afraid I don't know the other cities he covers - Manchester, Glasgow etc - as well but obviously readers from other parts of the country will know their local city. Recommended.

[Ade · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hatherley knows his stuff but makes few concessions to the reader who doesn't, which makes this book hard-going at times unless you can clearly separate the modern from the post-modern (not to mention the plain Brutalist). There is also a clear underlying leftist bias (post-war socialist idealism good, everything since bad), which doesn't bother me but I wondered if it rendered the overall thrust too one-sided. Nevertheless, I enjoyed his more perceptive snarks at the expense of planners, architects, critics and politicians. His concluding comments on Liverpool's not entirely disastrous deal with the devil are fair where deserved and harsh where necessary, and overall more evenly-balanced than you - or he - might have expected.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

So up my street I could have commissioned it, Hatherley's angry aesthetic Marxism is exciting and hugely relevant.

[John Bell · Rating 4 out of 5]

the first chapter identification and explanation of the very distinctive new labour pfi core style of architecture is worth the price of entry on its own.

[Holly Cruise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fairly early on in this book I hit a chapter which completely upended by entire experience of reading it. Specifically, it was the chapter on Manchester. This chapter made the rest of the book very difficult to read.

The book takes the form of a tour of the UK, stopping in at various cities to examine the way the socialist architecture of urban areas, often brutalist and functional, has been attacked by a wave of late c20th/early c21st building which is excluding the poor and shaving away character from cities. It's well written and engaging, managing to make a repetitive format not feel repetitive to read.

But...

Of the places in the book, there are two I know well enough to be able to comment on - Manchester and Liverpool. The Manchester chapter arrives fairly early in the book and was a huge problem for me as a reader. Put simply, two-thirds of the chapter is insightful and incisive on the issues I see around me in a city which is regenerating but also pushing out many of its residents. It is accurate and necessary writing which should be widely read, and describes situations which haven't changed much in the seven years since publication. Unfortunately the other third of the chapter is a load of complete bollocks which the author could only have written if he'd never spoken to an actual Mancunian in his life. The Beetham Tower viewed positively and with pride by locals? What?! Srsly!? Has the author never asked a Manc where the best views in the city are cos the answer is usually "From the Beetham Tower, cos then you can't see the tower itself".

And from that early point on it became hard to know what to make of the rest of the book. Were the places I didn't know being accurately described or was it all nonsense? By later in the book I had concluded that probably most of it was accurate, if only because the author seemed to betray an undeclared but clearly influential dislike for Manchester above all other cities - fair enough, but don't let it lead you to inaccuracy and do at least declare it more obviously early on! By the time I reached the last chapter on Liverpool - accurate and interesting - I was glad I'd read it, but it was not the easiest thing to do when I was having to actively suspend my cynicism at times.

It's probably best to read the chapter of the city you are most familiar with first, to gauge whether you find it accurate. I sincerely hope the rest of the book is accurate cos it would be a shame for such a well written piece to be unreliable.

[Mike Clarke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Architecture and amorality: it would be easy to dismiss Owen Hatherley as a teenage Guardian scribbler, a floppy-haired architectural ponce from London sneering at provincial shopping centres and housing developments, but he’s a clever polemicist and mostly, here, on-target. Let’s face it, Britain is a bit shit in places, isn’t it? You don’t need to be the editor of Crap Towns or a Wallpaper* reader to recognise the “cramped speculative blocks marketed as luxury flats” or “pointless piazzas with attendant branches of Costa Coffee.” Hatherley May spend a long time savaging architectural practices with names like Rogers Stark Halfwit that aren’t exactly familiar to the layperson - but then my architectural knowledge and understanding can’t tell the difference between a crypt and a cupola, so what would I know? And it gets a bit like he’s swallowed the NME style guide, or spent too long writing for student union papers, as there are far too many ‘aforementioneds’ and ‘hithertos’ for my ease of reading. Uneven, angry, and striking out at its foes with demotic energy, New Ruins hits more often than it misses and it’s not its author’s fault that, almost a decade on from its original publication, we might even welcome the odd shonkily-constructed multiplex or leaking public library: “a vision of a British future alienated, blankly consumerist, class-ridden.” As austerity has torn through the public services, so we wait nervously to see if Brexit will similarly flatten the private sector. Good luck, UK!

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A frustrating read. I'd hate to say that Hatherley's mate Joel wasted his time with the camera but Verso really should either have reproduced them much, much better.... or left them out. I wasn't sure of the intended audience for the book, although I gather it grew out of articles originally appearing in an architectural publication and it is quite a stretch for the general public even when you have some familiarity with the city in that chapter. Hatherley comes at his subject from a particular general political standpoint and it is hardly a spoiler to say he's not a fan of the results of Blairism and PFI (although you are often not entirely sure what he does and doesn't like) The whole is delivered with a lip curl that gets rather wearing (even if he's right) - he can be very amusing when he chooses and I wish he'd chosen more often. It's a very interesting if dispiriting subject.

The book came out in 2011 and it feels time for a new edition already. I'd love a whole book on student accommodation.

[Peter Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read some of Owen Hatherley's pieces for the Guardian. This book is an architectural tour around some of the cities in the UK completed in 2009. Hatherley takes stock of the Blair-era regeneration and it's impact on the built environment. His standpoint is in general one that favours what might be termed essentially modernism. Hatherley generally takes issue with the destruction of sixties public housing that had been left to decay in neglect (and then blamed for the social failures associated with poverty) and its replacement with poor quality high-rise "luxury" developments sold privately. It's an entertaining journey through urban Britain in the 2000's, and the picture Hatherley paints is in general not a flattering one. Goodness knows what he makes of the devastation wrought by the subsequent 14 years of Conservative austerity-driven government.

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspired by the uninspiring “Change We See” imperative of New Labour’s PFI love affair with supposedly public building programmes, Hatherley and his mate who does the photographs set out to examine the urban planning disasters and architectural mish-mash-ery of various former industrial cities, including my hometown of Nottingham. Hatherley’s guide encompasses politics, social history, the occasional foray into pop culture and, most of all, the love of architecture and the furious hatred of it done badly or pretentiously. It’s an offbeat but wholly readable and incandescently inspiring book.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

A mediocre book of architecture with a theme that seems to be ever evading in the final text as Hatherley jumps as popcorn from one theme to another: and how about this, and what you think about this, and this?

[Adam Deedman · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting dive into urban planning and architecture in recent history. Occasionally I found the jargon a little hard to understand, but that is more to do with my lack of knowledge of architecture than the fault of the author.

[Jade · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really drives home how gross some of the architecture is in the UK. I wish there was some more analysis on the North; the chapters on Southern cities seem to be longer and more in depth.

[tara bomp · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometimes the descriptions it gives aren't detailed enough without photos to give you a good feel for the buildings talked about, which is a bit frustrating. Like these buildings have so much more of an impact with actual decent photos and then you could let the photos do the talking for some of it

Also way too much use of "neoliberalism" in the introduction and I don't understand half the architecture shit so it's like only half interesting to me but hopefully I'll pick it up more as I go along. Sometimes he's really good at conjuring up an atmosphere and sometimes the architecture stuff I half understand and it makes sense to me and I agree.

Almost feels like a tour of britain where he shits on all buildings except suddenly they'll be one he likes because it's brutalist or whatever and then it's good even though there's no clear distinction of how it effects social environment etc

Also they go on about how good the Nottingham Contemporary is but it's a few shipping containers as a building. Didn't realise it was so easy to be an architect, apparently if I slap a few ugly shipping containers down I'm being "daringly minimalist"

Gonna pause it for now, it has that sort of tone that's all culture and very little politics but in a patronising tone that almost talks down about architecture that's really hard to explain and I probably sound dumb. I dunno I just don't like it much. Not enough about social environment and this sense that everything that matters is aesthetics of a kind. Also at one point there's a reference to "lumpen" as an almost insult which rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe I'll like it more some other time

[Ralph Britton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is not the easiest of reads, despite it's up to date relevance to the architecture we see around us. Hatherley has a complete grasp of the modern movements in architecture and the strongest views on what they have done to the country. He rarely feels the building of the last twenty years, whether it be 'heritage renewal' or shopping mall has done much to beautify the country. For a reader less in command of architectural theory he can sometimes be hard to follow but for the most part his brilliant diatribe against recent developments is compelling and very entertaining.
It works best if you know the place he describes. I found the chapters on Manchester and Liverpool most interesting because I have lived through and watched the developments he describes. He is particularly good on Greenwich, where he has lived for some years. He has an inside view on many architectural practices and the financial constraits they operate under and does not neglect the economic reasons for what is happening at the moment. You may not agree with him but he asks all the right questions. Some of the stories he tells are hilarious - if you can still laugh at the damage.

[Rachel Stevenson]

Architecture, cultural studies, the Olympics, Marxism, (post)modernism, neo-liberalism, JB Priestley, psychogeography, regeneration, urbanism, suburbanism, pop culture, Southampton - Hatherley writes about all this and more with sentences such as: “....so ...aggressively statist and weightily bureaucratic in form that the signifiers given out, always important in post-modernism sign fixated discourse, were deeply unattractive” or: “Non-orthogonal geometry and hyperbolic paraboloids purport to represent the experience of war”. You'd need an MA in post-industrial and post-modernist architectural design to grasp his message which is, essentially, New Labour were shit.

Strangely, he doesn't reference Patrick Wright who wrote 1991's A Journey Through Ruins, about how, essentially, Thatcherite neglect of the inner city was shit, and whose book title would seem to have influenced Hatherley's.

[Roger Boyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this, but it's one of those where you pay close attention to the bits you really know (Leeds/Sheffield/Greenwich), while the detail of the other learned chapters passed me by. Because I'm not a trained or practicing architect.

Odd book in some ways - many good & useful pictures, all BW. It's in the manner of Defoe, but rather more overtly political. he's not a fan of the right, centre, or centre-left :-).

So if all the chapters had been on my home towns, more stars.

[Joanna b · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really great to read someone who knows far more about architecture than I ever will being mean about things I hate. If you too hate the overuse of cladding, 'stunning riverside developments', anything described as 'luxury' or 'executive' you might enjoy this. Also he meets up with rentergirl at one point. The only thing I'm sad about is that he didn't come to Southend. Come to Southend Owen! There are terrible things here too!

[James Mack · Rating 4 out of 5]

I realised as I started reading this that I'd read it before. That's not to say that I hadn't enjoyed it before or that I didn't enjoy it this time. Interesting travelogue/review of contemporary architecture/sometime riposte to the worst consequences of New Labour urban planning. And great praise for Sheffield's Park Hill, which is always good to see. (And I really should visit Liverpool and Milton Keynes.)

[Gareth Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

One needs to have a good understanding of modern architecture to get the most from this book. Something that I lack. It is a tribute to Hatherley's style and enthusiasm that it held my interest even when I didn't understand all that he said. A very good guide to the architecture of modern Britain - its successes and failures.

[Jane Walker · Rating 2 out of 5]

The language of large parts of this book is so pretentious as to be unintelligible. The photos, which are essential, are not well enough reproduced to serve their purpose. And I still have no idea what kind of architecture Hatherley likes. That said, it was a worthwhile trip round some of our cityscapes.

[Tobias]

...

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heir to Pevsner here.

[Alan Fricker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great fun. A journey round the UK looking at brutalism and god awful recent buildings. A highly partial take with names named for some of the worst. A bit of history and well worth a read

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Acerbic, and often spot-on. When he isn't spot on though, he fervor makes him sound blinkered and dogmatic (which he would probably cheerfully admit, he is)

[Ingmar Boddington · Rating 2 out of 5]

A walk through the architecture of various UK cities, venturing into the economics and politics behind their current states. Interesting, but heavy on abstract references and highly opinionated.