Owen Hatherley

Scandinavia​ was the exemplar for 20th-century British architecture, the place that designers most wanted to recreate. Britain shared with Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland a superficially similar history of maritime expansion, Protestantism, capitalism, Labourism and – in Denmark’s case – imperialism. And in the postwar years it aspired to the social democratic consensus...

Fassbinder was flamboyantly gay, proudly ugly, extremely left-wing, outrageously productive and had an astonishing eye. It’s easy to imagine him, if he’d lived, being one of those strange boomers who have managed a seamless transition to the new media reality, a Bob Dylan or David Lynch, posting gnomic tweets, putting out brilliant TikToks and hosting a podcast where he plays Schlager music and discusses Sex-pol theory.

My​ father lived in West London in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a time when, on high ground, Battersea power station dominated the skyline. These days he travels regularly along the Southampton-Waterloo line, originally the South Western Railway. Where the line’s depot once stood at Nine Elms, there is a chaos of luxury investment vehicles, towers sprouting in every available space...

For​ at least a thousand years, London has been England’s first city. The unofficial title of ‘second city’ has changed hands many times. York, Norwich, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool have all taken a turn. Since the First World War, Birmingham has generally been considered the UK’s second city. It became the second most populous city in England in 1911, and in...

The Red Gate tower in Moscow, designed by 
Alexei Nikolayevich Dushkin and completed in 1953.

One of the more intriguing​ recent conspiracy theories centres on the putative suppression of a global ‘Tartarian Empire’, which, before it was destroyed either by the world wars or by a tidal wave of mud, went in for an opulent, gigantist architecture of domes and spires,...