A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain
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| Author | Owen Hatherley |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | British architecture and urbanism, modern architecture, brutalist architecture |
| Published | 2010 (Verso Books) |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 400 |
| ISBN | |
A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain is a book by the British writer Owen Hatherley, published by Verso Books in November 2010. The book is a critique of the architecture and urbanism of postmodern Britain, taking the form of a tour of British cities.
A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain is Hatherley's second book, following a quartet of essays entitled Militant Modernism published in 2008. Considerable overlap and repetition exists between the two works.
Hatherley introduces A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain as "an autopsy of the urban renaissance", referring to a program initiated under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and associated with the private finance initiative, city academies and the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. In his introduction, Hatherley quotes Karl Seitz's statement upon the opening of the Karl Marx-Hof in Vienna: "by these stones shall we be judged." Seitz's words, set in the context of the attack on the Karl Marx-Hof a year later by fascists fighting the Austrian Civil War, serve as guiding principles for the book. The book forms a catalogue raisonné of what the author describes as "pseudomodernism".
The journey, on which Hatherley was accompanied by photographer Joel Anderson, begins in Southampton, where Hatherley grew up, and takes in Milton Keynes, Nottingham, Manchester, Tyneside, Glasgow, Cambridge, several towns in Yorkshire, Cardiff, Liverpool and Greenwich. Hatherley focuses on the prior decade's programmes of regeneration and the remains of past civic improvements. In Cambridge, Hatherley reluctantly praises the Accordia development; while in Glasgow he describes BBC Pacific Quay as "decent, upstanding, moderate modernism" and praises buildings in the vicinity of Glasgow Central station; and in Tyneside he praises T. Dan Smith's desire to build a "Brasilia of the North".
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