Owen Hatherley’s The Alienation Effect, about European émigrés, is out in paperback.
One simple way of grasping the magnitude of what has happened to London over the last thirty years is to compare the introductions to the first and most recent editions of Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward’s Guide to the Architecture of London. In 1983, they wrote of a city in decline, its population down by about a sixth from its postwar height.
Jonathan Meades, for the last thirty years Britain’s most consistently surprising and informative writer on the built environment, has finally published a book on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television. Meades has never been a fully paid-up architectural correspondent; he argues in Museum without Walls that taking up such a job helped destroy Ian Nairn.
Owen Hatherley talks to Ash Sarkar about his latest book Red Metropolis, in which he looks at the red underbelly of London, Capital of world capitalism.
During the 1930s and into the war years, the Mail’s readers regarded refugees as ‘a series of ranting Cassandras dropped in English suburbia, warning of imminent catastrophes that were impossible...
London’s promotion to the status of ‘world city’ in the past twenty years has less to do with its diversity than with the opportunities it presents for property investments more stable...
Back in the day, everyone knew that Stalinist architecture was hateful.
Owen Hatherley understands the dangers of ‘nostalgia for the future’, but he’s too far gone to pull out.
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