Owen Hatherley’s The Alienation Effect, about European émigrés, is out in paperback.
My father lived in West London in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a time when, on high ground, Battersea power station dominated the skyline. These days he travels regularly along the Southampton-Waterloo line, originally the South Western Railway. Where the line’s depot once stood at Nine Elms, there is a chaos of luxury investment vehicles, towers sprouting in every available space...
For at least a thousand years, London has been England’s first city. The unofficial title of ‘second city’ has changed hands many times. York, Norwich, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool have all taken a turn. Since the First World War, Birmingham has generally been considered the UK’s second city. It became the second most populous city in England in 1911, and in...
The Red Gate tower in Moscow, designed by Alexei Nikolayevich Dushkin and completed in 1953.
One of the more intriguing recent conspiracy theories centres on the putative suppression of a global ‘Tartarian Empire’, which, before it was destroyed either by the world wars or by a tidal wave of mud, went in for an opulent, gigantist architecture of domes and spires,...
Kraftwerk seemed to be aiming at a kind of electronic Esperanto, an imaginary universal language that anyone could learn, anyone could speak, anyone could dance to.
The Jubilee Line used to be one of the better London Underground lines to travel on if, like me, you have Crohn’s disease. When the line was extended in the late 1990s, some of the new stations – Stratford, Canada Water, North Greenwich – were equipped with toilets, a great rarity on the Tube. They weren’t very nice, but if you’re liable to need the loo...
Owen Hatherley talks to Ash Sarkar about his latest book Red Metropolis, in which he looks at the red underbelly of London, Capital of world capitalism.
During the 1930s and into the war years, the Mail’s readers regarded refugees as ‘a series of ranting Cassandras dropped in English suburbia, warning of imminent catastrophes that were impossible...
London’s promotion to the status of ‘world city’ in the past twenty years has less to do with its diversity than with the opportunities it presents for property investments more stable...
Back in the day, everyone knew that Stalinist architecture was hateful.
Owen Hatherley understands the dangers of ‘nostalgia for the future’, but he’s too far gone to pull out.
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