Owen Hatherley: A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain (2012)

“The urban state of the nation—from Olympic dreams to broken Britain.

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, 2012
ISBN 1844679098, 9781844679096
640 pages

review (Andy Beckett, The Guardian)
review (Sarah Morrison, The Independent)
review (Igor Toronyi-Lalic, The Telegraph)

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