He works as a journalist and critic for Architects Journal, Architectural Review, Dezeen, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, New Humanist and Prospect. He is the author of several books: Militant Modernism (Zero, 2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010), Uncommon – An Essay on Pulp (Zero, 2011), Across the Plaza (Strelka, 2012), A New Kind of Bleak – Journeys through Urban Britain (Verso 2012), which was set to music by the group Golau Glau; Landscapes of Communism (Penguin 2015), The Ministry of Nostalgia (Verso, 2016),Trans-Europe Express (Penguin 2018) and The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space (Repeater, 2018).
He also edited and introduced an updated edition of Ian Nairn’s Nairn’s Towns (Notting Hill Editions, 2013), and wrote texts for the exhibition Brutalust: Celebrating Post-War Southampton, at the K6 Gallery. Between 2006 and 2010 he wrote the blog ‘Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy’. He is the culture editor of Tribune.
The workings of western capitalism were almost as unknown in the Eastern Bloc as the everyday realities of ‘real socialism’ were among western Trotskyists. Then, after ’89, eastern Europe disappeared off the political map of the left. Nowhere was this more so than in Britain, writes Owen Hatherley.
