A Guide To The New Ruins Of Great Britain

The abattoir of good intentions which is post-War British architecture has been written about, filmed, critiqued, excoriated and despaired of so many times in the last sixty years — without apparently making the slightest difference to the developers and planning authorities whose decisions we all have to live in — it hardly seems worth launching another philippic against the short-termism and want of taste which disfigure this noblest of professions. But in A Guide To The New Ruins Of Great Britain Owen Hatherley has given it a go, all the same. So should we pay attention?

Well, there's a pleasing air of enfant terrible about him, arising in part from his amiably spiky Nastybrutlalistandshort blog presence; and, in larger measure, from his determined boosting of the lost world of architectural Modernism. For Hatherley, shuttered concrete, elevated walkways and exposed water tanks are elements of a greater truth which our culture has forsworn, but which still has so much to give, if only we'd let it. The darker overtones of top-down social reconstruction, of Stalinism in fact, only add to the period charm. And if, by declaring his love for what has come to be seen as a failed architecture he runs the risk of attitudinising, then that's a legitimate part of the performance.

Not that it overwhelms everything else. In fact, A Guide To The New Ruins Of Great Britain turns out to be respectably conventional in its ambitions, with clear antecedents both in J.B. Priestley's 1934 English Journey, and Ian Nairn's Outrage, published as a standalone volume by the Architectural Press in 1955. It's a slice-of-Britain assemblage, taking in Southampton, Milton Keynes, Nottingham, Liverpool, and other large places accessible by train. It's personal, haphazardly informative, full of saeva indignatio, and defiantly critical of the modern built environment. It can also be very funny, and, when devoting itself to somewhere that Hatherley actually likes (e.g. Glasgow), bracing, in a lopsided, unpredictable sort of way.

And it is 350 pages long. Which is where the trouble starts: this is a lot of material, and it's not obvious that the writer or his collaborators are up to it.

An early casualty is the prose. 'As planning,' Hatherley writes about Milton Keynes, 'this is the same as everywhere else, but the form is different, which is not insignificant.' A page later, 'The snobbery which the new towns invariably face is not wholly analogous to the persecution of Alan Turing, but both exemplify a similar small-mindedness.' You get the feeling that, among all the arm-waving and phrase-making, coherence is in danger of going out of the window. Which it duly does, with the result that in Nottingham: 'Initially, this seems like one of those ubiquitous, shallow gestures at contextualism (here with the former lace mills nearby).'

At the same time, what do we make of the photographs? Outrage is very nearly a photo-essay (heavy on roadsigns, street lights, transport cafes) and The New Ruins, too, recognises the primacy of the image. Snag is (and the economics of publishing are surely to blame) the accompanying pictures are small and poorly reproduced. Salford Quays? Avant-contextualism? A police station in Cardiff? The good looks about the same as the bad –  or, to put it another way, everything looks terrible — and so an essential aid to understanding gets traduced by production values.

But there is a bigger problem yet. And it is structural. It's an easy irony, but let's succumb to it anyway: A Guide To The New Ruins Of Great Britain lacks a sense of architecture. As a tour of Britain's urban landscapes, itcertainly packs in plenty of examples, some of which get a tick (the Portes Cochères of Milton Keynes), some of which get a cross (the whole of Sky Plaza, Leeds), some of which attract a comment so involuted you have to read it three times to know if it's praise or blame (Gleadless Valley, Sheffield: 'Bruno Taut's Berlin via Neutra's Los Angeles, refracted through the English Picturesque'). But it all comes (whatever it may be) with a train-spotter's indifference to any larger argument; and a comparable unconcern about the reader's terms of reference. It starts at Southampton, ends at Liverpool, and strikes pretty much the same note throughout. Cause and effect; the exposition of a theory; a differentiated narrative — well, they just doesn't happen.

At the same time, much is axiomatic or taken for granted. New Labour's values helped poison the built environment; the tenets of Modernism, correctly embodied, are potentially redemptive; Charles Barry, best known for the Palace of Westminster, was apparently an architect of the 'Regency period'; a bit of northern England reminds us 'That the hypermodernist Situationist urbanism of New Babylon was originally inspired by gypsy camps'; Joy Division were a great band; and so on. The author seems happy to settle for a process of voluble accretion, rather than anything more robust. Maybe this is just what happens when you go from blogging to 350 pages of continuous, discursive prose, and discover the limits of a once-workable episodic editorial approach.

Or, maybe, the reader should adjust his or her sights accordingly, and dip in and out, blog-style, taking in ten pages of polemic on the fly, before putting the book down again. After all, The New Ruins does call itself a Guide: and it strikes this reader that a  guidebook is what it could have been, much in the manner of Nairn's London. Taken in smaller chunks, Hatherley's fixations, his obscurantism and his occasional grandstanding, add variety to the mix, rather than compromise it. Is the book, in other words, less a failure of content, than of form? And what, like Sky Plaza, would it take to fix it?