A New Kind of Bleak : Journeys Through Urban Britain

In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain , Owen Hatherley skewered New Labour’s architectural legacy in all its witless swagger. Now, in the year of the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, he sets out to describe what the Coalition’s altogether different approach to economic mismanagement and civic irresponsibility is doing to the places where the British live. In a journey that begins and ends in the capital, Hatherley takes us from Plymouth and Brighton to Belfast and Aberdeen, by way of the eerie urbanism of the Welsh valleys and the much-mocked splendour of modernist Coventry. Everywhere outside the unreal Southeast, the building has stopped in towns and cities, which languish as they wait for the next bout of self-defeating austerity. Hatherley writes with unrivalled aggression about the disarray of modern Britain, and yet this remains a book about possibilities remembered, about unlikely successes in the midst of seemingly inexorable failure. For as well as trash, ancient and modern, Hatherley finds signs of the hopeful country Britain once was and hints of what it might become. "What happens when ruination overtakes regeneration? Following on from A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherley investigates the fate of British cities in the desolate new world of savage public-sector cuts, when government funds are withdrawn and the Welfare State abdicates. He explores the urban consequences of what Conservatives privately call the progressive nonsense of the Big Society and the localism agenda, the putative replacement of the state with charity and voluntarism; and he casts an eye over the last great Blairite schemes limping to completion, from London's Shard to the site of the 2012 Olympics. Crisscrossing Britain from Aberdeen to Plymouth, from Croydon to Belfast, A New Kind of Bleak finds a landscape left to rot - and discovers strange and potentially radical things growing in the wasteland.'--Publisher's description Introduction: will there still be building, in the dark times? The Thames gateway : one of the dark places of the earth Teeside : infantilized hercules Preston : nothing great but man Barrow-in-Furness : diving for pearls The metropolitan county of the West Midlands : the patchwork explains, the land is unchanged Bristol : the tyranny of structurelessness Brighton and Hove : on parade Croydon : zone 5 strategy Plymouth : fables of the reconstruction Oxford : Quadrangle and Banlieue Leicester : another middle England Lincoln : between two cathedrals The valleys : I am a pioneer, they cAll me primitive Edinburgh : capital (it fails us now) Aberdeen : where the money went From Govan to Cumbernauld: was the solution worse than the problem? Belfast : we are not going away The City of London : the beginning is nigh Acknowledgements Index Index of places. What happens when ruination overtakes regeneration? Following on from A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain , Owen Hatherley investigates the fate of British cities in the desolate new world of savage public-sector cuts, when government funds are withdrawn and the Welfare State abdicates. He explores the urban consequences of what Conservatives privately call the progressive nonsense of the Big Society and the localism agenda, the putative replacement of the state with charity and voluntarism; and he casts an eye over the last great Blairite schemes limping to completion, from London 's Shard to the site of the 2012 Olympics. Crisscrossing Britain from Aberdeen to Plymouth, from Croydon to Belfast, A New Kind of Bleak finds a landscape left to rot and discovers strange and potentially radical things growing in the wasteland. In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, the author previously turned a deeply critical and scornful eye on how New Labour's approach to economics and politics had influenced the built environment of Britain. In this work he returns to the topic in order to examine how the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition policies--"Thatcherism with the New Labour fig leaf stripped off as no longer useful."--have impacted the urban landscape, taking the reader along on his own travels through Britain (with a greater focus on Scotland in this work) and describing the negative impacts of the coalition's policies, as well as occasional "glimpses of potential new worlds." . Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) An anatomy of failed-state Britain, by the author of A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain.