A guide to the new ruins of Great Britain

I'm currently enjoying Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010).

It's a vicious attack on New Labour's PFI projects in 'regenerating' city centres. He terms the new style of PFI architecture 'pseudo-modernism', which takes some of the clean lines of modernism and bastardises them with the overt and ironic 'signs' features of postmodernism. The characteristics of the 'Blairite urbanism' are as follows (p.302):
  • use of a former brownfield site;
  • lots of wood detailing;
  • rhetoric of sustainability undermined by huge car parks and shopping malls adjacent;
  • water features;
  • brightly coloured rendered concrete;
  • irregular windows;
  • estate agent cliches.
There's an interesting chapter on Manchester, investigating how post-punk reflected the reaction to the slum clearances of the 1960s. By contrast, all he sees in the 'regenerated' Manchester is emptiness and falsity. Interesting fact that before all the warehouses were turned into loft apartments, in 1987 the city centre population was only around 300; now it's around 11,000. Yet all this comes with a social and indeed cultural price. The Spinningfields business district is the 'home of credit crunch chic'. The Urban Splash tower blocks in Collyhurst, which I often watch trundle by as I leave Victoria, come in for particular criticism. Named after suffragettes, and decked in artificial wood and pink paint, they are 'another example of the use of radical Mancunian history to sell Old Corruption all over again...It's surely only a matter of time before some disused factory or council block becomes Peterloo Apartments or Engels Mansions'. (p.141) Perfect examples of the soul-lessness of 'pseudo-modernism', slapping heritage onto every project to give it meaning, but taking the real meaning out in the process.
one of the 'Pankhurst' blocks in the mist
Also, the chapter on the West Riding has photographs of the wastes around Wakefield Kirkgate and the massive hole in the centre of Bradford that mirror almost exactly the ones that I took on my research trips. I must have a similar architectural/psychogeographical mind.
old railway station hotel pub,
Wakefield Kirkgate, 2010
'give it back to the people' graffiti
on the defunkt Bradford Westfield development, 2009





















His blog is also worth a look - http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Commemoration of the execution of 17 Luddites, York, 19 January 2013

Image
On Saturday 19 January, York's Alternative History held an afternoon of talks and commemoration for the Luddites tried and executed at York. placards outside York Castle In the huge space of the Guild Hall, Adam Gutteridge , one of the organisers, introduced the themes of the day. His speech echoed the two interesting articles publicising the event in the Guardian (by local historian Paul Furness, here , and by another organiser Helen Graham, here ). They argue that now that York's industrial economy is no more (chocolate and railways), York has remade itself round the past: an economy of tourism. Yet the past as presented to tourists and indeed to residents, is a sanitised and normalised history, centring round Vikings, medieval religion, and Georgian middle-class pleasures. The recent York 800 celebrations had no place for the popular protest and resistance that had a distinguished history in the city. I began the talks by explaining the context and meaning of the
Read more

Workshopping: reflections on 'flipping' my seminars

Image
My colleagues and I have, over the past couple of years, been replacing the traditional 1 hour lecture- 1 hour seminar format with a 'workshop' of 2 or 3 hours. Of course, many of us have been teaching practical skills and 'interactively' for years, if not our entire careers, but we have come to the conclusion that we have to spell it out for our students more explicitly, both through the timing of the sessions and the activities in them. Why? We're shifting from seminars to workshops because, among other reasons: demand for increased student contact time with staff is a feature of questions at open days, the NSS, and the media; due to budget constraints and other factors, seminar group sizes are getting larger students unfortunately do not always prepare enough reading before the seminars to make discussion among them useful or continuous. No3 results from several reasons, including: a) the structure of their degree (at UH, students study 4 modules per
Read more