A New Kind Of Bleak - Owen Hatherley

A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain, Owen Hathersley, London, Verso, 2012.

Li + 382 pp., £12.99 (paperback), ISBN-13: 978-178168-075-9

Polemical, ideologically-driven, episodic - all terms which might be levelled at Owen Hathersley's latest book,  A New Kind of Bleak.  Usually in any work of serious academic intent such a description would be regarded as pejorative; however, in Hathersley's case, his relish for radical argument and poise in taking an audacious, partisan stance form a key part of the book's strength.

Hathersley summarises the purpose of the book in his extended introductory essay, 'this is a book [....] about architecture and town planning that uses these as a way to talk about politics (or vice versa).' (p.xxiii).  It is illuminating to reflect on this statement momentarily, for Hathersley takes a particular stance in relation to politics and architecture and has an interesting and innovative approach when talking about them.

Politically the author is firmly rooted in a Marxist tradition writing regularly for the Socialist Review and Socialist Worker as well as the mainstream press. As an architectural historian Hathersley has a particular interest in a re-evaluation of post war modernist architecture in Britain and its position as part of a broader movement in Scandinavia, Germany and The Soviet Bloc. Militant Modernism (2008),  Hathersley's previous book on the subject, described by a Guardian reviewer as trying to ''excavate utopia' from the ruins of modernism,' took an essentially academic stance. In some senses A New Kind of Bleak adopts a more accessible, popularist approach. It is structured, as the sub-title intimates, around eighteen walks through the cities of Britain. It is not a travelogue however, but political analysis masquerading as architectural commentary. How Hathersley uses an essentially Marxist dialectic to unpick the politics of the urban landscape is worthy of more detailed consideration.

Although the book opens and closes with his reflections on buildings in London, most of it concentrates on 'some extremely unlovely places, [....] potential new worlds in Leicester, Cumbernauld, Lincoln and Coventry,' (p. L)  each place seemingly a topographical manifestation of Auden's assertion that 'we can twig from what we are not/what we might be next. Every journey can be read as a separate essay as each one takes the particular tack hinted at in their subtitles: BRISTOL, The Tyranny of Structurelessness; TEESIDE, Infantalised Hercules; OXFORD, Quadrangle and Banlieue. Thought-provoking each essay may be, but to read each section of the book as separate statements would be to miss Hathersley's broader discourse which is revealed by a dialectic between, and within each chapter.

Buildings themselves are used as ciphers for political analysis. Compare the consideration in the introductory essay of Unison's new building  in Kings Cross - dubbed by Hathersley as 'A Corporate Headquarters for Collectivists', (p. xxxii).- with the critique of Richard Rogers' iconic Lloyds building in the City in the final chapter. (p. 348).  The former is seen as what 'Blairite' architecture may have resembled if New Labour had remained socialist; the latter is presented as a subversion of the 'inside out' architecture of Rogers' Pompidou Centre in Les Halles. Paris, where an aesthetic developed for a 'People's Culture Palace' is adapted to the needs of hyper-capitalism by purloining the collectivist style but retaining at its post-modernist heart a 'palladian bunker',in the guise of a perfect re-creation of Lloyd's original Georgian, Adam-style board-room. Each building is analysed as a metaphor for the politics which produced it.

Whole cities, and districts within them, are treated as socio-political products. In chapter sixteen the Glasgow shipbuilding district of Govan is compared with the nearby new-town of Cumbernauld. The question posed  - is the solution (a Scandinavian-styled new-town) actually worse than the problem (a de-industrialised Victorian subub). Hathersley sees merit and challenge in both. As the book progresses a challenging argument emerges from the apparently disparate earlier 'urban trawls'.

The penultimate chapter concerns Belfast, exploring the peculiarities of the city's recent development as a reflection of its sectarian history. What Hathersley asserts, is not Belfast's uniqueness but its parallels with other British cities - 'rampant inequality, de-industrialisation, social division and poverty’. 'Peace lines in Clapham are not implausible' the author wryly comments. (p. 330). It is clear that the chapter on Belfast is deliberately juxtaposed with the concluding section on London. Here the creation of a 'riverside yuppiedrome' and the resultant displacement of the East End's ethnically diverse working class residents is presented as a covert struggle no less 'sectarian' than the more overt Northern Irish 'Troubles'. 

A New Kind of Bleak is a radical, thought provoking book whose travelogue format make it accessible to a wider readership than the students or architecture, planning or politics more normally associated with the subject matter. The book has flaws, there is no attempt whatsoever to avoid a partisan stance and to enjoy it one must accept this  polemical intent.  In terms of design, the black and white photographs are so poorly reproduced as to render them incomprehensible and the line drawings by Laura Oldfield Ford simply illustrate rather than enlighten the text. However, these are small matters in an overall impressive work which succeeds in to outlining the untold story of New Labour's vain attempt to create in cities across Britain, 'a Barcelona or Berlin using the methods of Canary Wharf'.