Throwing the book at them

This Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain accuses the Blair project of a pernicious effect on architecture. Whatever your politics, its a treatise you can’t ignore, says Hugh Pearman

It’s a provocative title for a start. ‘New Ruins’, eh? It tells you everything about where Owen Hatherley is coming from. This book is an epitaph for the built legacy of the Tony Blair years which, as far as Hatherley is concerned, has about as much staying-power as the collapsed New Labour project. Hatherley is from the real Left, so he writes with real venom. He is not trained in architecture or art history, so he comes refreshingly free of preconceptions about what buildings it is suitable to like or not like. And at 29, he has an enormous respect for Old Modernism, particularly in its 1960s Brutalist phase. He regards Sheffield’s Park Hill, say, as something precious, not to be trifled with. Which is one of several reasons why he REALLY hates that most successful and award-winning of all ‘regeneration’-minded developers, Urban Splash, which is jauntily gentrifying the magnificently dour Park Hill blocks with English Heritage’s acquiescence.

The way our cities have turned out during the early years of the 21st century is so Blairite, he argues, that brittle, superficial look, all terracotta and coloured panelling and pale wood and glass, all those Identikit buy-to-let blocks everywhere. He doesn’t have a good word to say for any of it much, and can be savagely dismissive of admittedly easy targets like Make’s regrettable Jubilee Campus buildings at Nottingham University, but he’s witty with it. 

So much, then, for the ‘Urban Renaissance’ and the PFI culture that came with it, along with such architectural fashion tics as the ubiquitous ‘barcode facade’. Hatherley begins his journey in Southampton (one of the most overlooked British cities), mostly describing post-war developments – from the utopianism of troubled council estates through to the poky ‘stunning developments’ of today, setting one against the other.

He puts in the legwork. Unlike most architecture critics, he is utterly fascinated by the provinces. He returns to Sheffield, for instance, over and over again. Manchester – the most ‘revived’ of all city centres - holds an almost equal fascination, and Leeds, managed by the last of the city architects, a kind of horror. He journeys also to Glasgow and Cardiff, Tyneside, Greenwich, Milton Keynes, Nottingham,  Liverpool and, somewhat incongruously, Cambridge. Such peregrinations are nothing to a man whose idea of fun is to pick his way through Eastern Europe’s Soviet-era housing estates.

Hatherley seeks the pearls in the piggeries. He praises Caruso St John’s Nottingham Contemporary, for instance (bafflingly overlooked for the Stirling), and, somewhat surprisingly given his political stance on public versus private space, finds some good things to say about the BDP-masterplanned Liverpool One. And terrible things to say about their WestQuay mega-mall in Southampton (‘there’s a spectacular incoherence to it all’.) He sees good buildings being demolished, bad ones being refurbished, tacky new ones being built, a blindness to the merits of the postwar reconstruction. To read him praising the early 1960s, semi-subterranean, threatened Castle Market in Sheffield, is to hear the true architecture enthusiast.

Hatherley is an important new voice. Formidably well-read, he is an amateur in the very best sense. His polemic is deeply felt and, for all his occasional showboating, just. The book has its longeurs – it could have been more tightly edited – and the smudgy photo reproduction does Hatherley’s photographer companion Joel Anderson no favours. But this surgical evisceration of the cityscapes of Blairism is required reading.

A guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain
Owen Hatherley, pub. Verso, HB, 256pp, £17.00.

Editor’s selection

Birmingham’s Victorian and Edwardian Architects
Edited by Phillada Ballard, Oblong, £41
The glory of the architecture of Birmingham’s most prosperous era is overdue a detailed study. Categorised by period and style and organised by practice, this highlights the pride the city had in itself and its own architects. EY

A Garden and Three Houses
Jane Brown, Turn End Charitable Trust, £25
The title says it all: this small development and home for architect Peter Aldington and his family are inextricably linked to the garden that flows around them. The architecture and gardens embodied a sense of life and dwelling in this 1999 reissue. EY

Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State
Edited by Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Blackdog Publishing, £24.95
Tending to academia, this book has insights into Swedish culture and is interesting for potential parallels between full-on social democracy and the UK version. EY