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“... 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 and wrapping around the power station itself ...”

“... 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 frequently and urgently when you’re out and about, it’s nice to know that you’re provided for ...”

“... Part​ of what makes Owen Jones such a phenomenally successful figure by left-of-Labour standards is his ability to be several things at once. He is both insider, reporting back to ‘us’ about what ‘they’ think, and outsider, as shocked and angry about it as ‘we’ might be. He was brought up in Sheffield, Falkirk and Stockport and speaks in a sharp Mancunian accent, but he is also an Oxford graduate, with all the connections that can entail ...”

“... In thinking about how we got here, Srnicek and Williams – like so many recent writers, from Owen Jones to Mark Fisher to Philip Mirowski – lay great stress on the think-tanks (the Mont Pelerin Society and the like) that had their solutions ready when Keynesianism faltered in the mid-1970s. The ‘folk politics’ of Climate Camps, single-issue ...”

“... When​ the Health and Social Care Bill was passed into law at the start of 2012, it elicited one of those usually impotent hashtag campaigns seen so often on Twitter, where – the notion is – thousands of people using the same tag manifest the strength of the collective will. An earlier and very popular hashtag, #welovetheNHS, had been started in response to the claim by opponents of Obama’s ‘public option’ in US healthcare that the NHS was a widely hated basket case ...”

“... Adorno​ is easily parodied. Photos on social media show him frog-like, myopic and bald, denouncing the willing consumption of dross, the personal embodiment of a refusal to ‘let people enjoy things’. Another meme features Reverend Lovejoy from The Simpsons derisively brandishing a copy of Minima Moralia: ‘You ever sat down and read this thing?’ (In the original, it’s the Bible the reverend is holding up to ridicule ...”

“... Jonathan Meades, for the last thirty years Britain’s most consistently surprising and informative writer on the built environment, has finally published a book on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television ...”

“... sheltered housing in Streatham are missing. As for the gloriously aggressive, tasteless work of Owen Luder, such as Eros House and the Catford Centre, one shudders to think what the authors might have made of it. In this they are again products of their time; critics who are too young to have seen these being built can be much more complimentary, as Tom ...”

“... 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, encompassing everything from St Paul’s in London to St Basil’s in Moscow ...”

“... When​ asked in 1974, halfway through his too-brief career, whether he thought films ought to be critical rather than affirmative, Rainer Werner Fassbinder replied that ‘the best thing’ he could imagine ‘would be to create a union between something as beautiful and powerful and wonderful as the Hollywood film and a criticism of the status quo ...”

“... Square Car Park and the Dunston Rocket, both in Gateshead, both designed by Rodney Gordon for Owen Luder Architects. House of Ritual Services, Vilnius He heard Joy Division, and realised that this brutal world was the landscape they were describing: ‘On the tenth floor, down the back stairs, it’s a no-man’s-land’. Pop quotations are attached ...”

“... 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 Britain forty years later, overtaking Glasgow ...”

“... In Enrica Colusso​ ’s film Home Sweet Home, about the recently ‘decanted’ Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, southeast London, a town planner explains why nearly all the buildings around him – a large council estate and a covered shopping centre – have to be demolished. They’re not real streets, he says. They’re monocultures – allowing for just one type of thing, housing here, shopping there – and worse than that, they’re mono-tenure, one gigantic ‘project’ of poor people put in one place ...”

“... Architecture,’ Owen Hatherley states in his essay ‘The Brutishness of British Modernism’, ‘unlike the other arts, can’t be ignored, can’t be passively consumed, not if you have to live in it.’ His published writings thus far have been a stinging lash across the back of current architectural criticism – a necessary corrective to its supine state ...”