This is what austerity looks like: a nation surviving on the results of what conservatives privately call "the progressive nonsense" of the Big Society agenda.
In a journey that begins and ends in the capital, but takes in Belfast, Aberdeen, Plymouth and Brighton, Hatherley explores modern Britain's urban landscape and finds a short-sighted disarray of empty buildings, malls and glass towers. Yet while A New Kind of Bleak anatomizes "broken Britain," Hatherley also looks to a hopeful future and discovers fragments of what it might look like.
Illustrated by Laura Oldfield Ford, author and artist of Savage Messiah.
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 9781781680759
Number of pages: 434
Weight: 556 g
Dimensions: 210 x 140 x 35 mm
A humanely barbed Nikolaus Pevsner for our times ... This book should be required reading for planners, developers and architects. - Independent
Hatherley has busily constructed a cult reputation as the angry young man of architectural criticism. - Guardian
Engaging, fearless and startlingly intelligent polemicist. - Time Out
Essential reading for anyone who ever feels their blood start to boil when they hear the word 'regeneration.' - Hari Kunzru
Owen Hatherley brings to bear a quizzing eye, venomous wit, supple prose, refusal to curry favour, rejection of received ideas, exhaustive knowledge and all-round bolshiness. - Jonathan Meades
Fierce and original. - Andy Beckett, Guardian
He writes with venom and flare ... [It is] refreshing to see politics reintroduced to the architectural debate. - Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times
[A] bracing antidote to the faux-chumminess of so much British cultural discourse. - Sukhdev Sandhu, Icon
A timely counterpoint to Britain's jubilee and Olympics self-congratulation ... observed with a precision and fury to force you to open your eyes. - Metro
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