Guardian Book Review: " 'Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain', by Owen Hatherley"

Click on Manchester photo for The Guardian's review, and for purchase details

"... In Hatherley's addictive illustrated travelogue, we encounter "cramped speculative blocks marketed as 'luxury flats'", "pointless piazzas with attendant branches of Costa Coffee", the "Disneyfication" of museums, "class cleansing" disguised as urban regeneration, and, everywhere, a glass‑and-steel contemporary building style that he calls "Pseudomodernism".
 
"NEAR the end of this angry, melancholy book, the author visits the Greenwich Dome. But now, instead of the green, inclusive, continental-style new city quarter Labour supporters might have hoped for, he finds:

'a transplant of America at its worst – gated communities, entertainment hangars and malls criss-crossed by carbon-spewing roads; a vision of a [British] future – alienated, blankly consumerist, class-ridden.' "

(Click picture for Verso Books web site)