Owen Hatherley

Owen Hatherley’s most recent book is Transitional Objects: Photographs of Poland.

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.

Ranting Cassandras: Refugee Artists

Jonathan Meades, 26 June 2025

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 to...

Read more reviews

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 than gold,...

Read more reviews

Almost Lovable: What Stalin Built

Sheila Fitzpatrick, 30 July 2015

Back in the day, everyone knew that Stalinist architecture was hateful.

Read more reviews

It hits in the gut

Will Self, 8 March 2012

Owen Hatherley understands the dangers of ‘nostalgia for the future’, but he’s too far gone to pull out.

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences