A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain (Paperback)

Owen Hatherley (author)

£24.99

Paperback 434 Pages
Published: 09/04/2013

Your local Waterstones may have stock of this item. Please check by using Click & Collect

Synopsis

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 3 mm

MEDIA REVIEWS

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 *