Guest-edited by Owen Hatherley, thirty-three writers; architects, activists, and Londoners present thirty-three essays exploring famous and unheralded buildings, streets, estates and neighbourhoods across the thirty-three London boroughs.00With contributions from columnist Aditya Chakrabortty to the historian Gillian Darley, via playwright Hanif Kureishi and the politician Emma Dent Coad, the Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs is a journey into the neighbourhoods, housing estates and public buildings of London?s rich urban landscape.00Encompassing everything from Brutalist Polish community centres to suburban garden cities, from pioneering modernist estates to ornate Victorian greenhouses, as seen through everything from grime videos to the films of Patrick Keiller, this book will be a refreshing journey into the city you have been missing, and a celebration of the buildings, places and landscapes which make it special.00In reimagining our guidebook this year we set out to create a book that is as interesting to handle as it is to read. A thoughtful approach to typography and printing conceived by Studio Christopher Victor will bring together the longer essays with highlights from Open City?s extended network of community groups. Richly illustrated with images and artefacts from some of the city?s vast and eclectic museum collections and archives that have remained closed to the public throughout the pandemic, the guide will be offset-printed in London using premium book papers and metallic spot colours.

A polemical history of municipal socialism in London - and an argument for turning this capitalist capital red again. A polemical history of municipal socialism in London -- and an argument for turning this capitalist capital red again. London is conventionally seen as merely a combination of the financial centre in the City and the centre of governmental power in Westminster, a uniquely capitalist capital city. This book is about the third London - a social democratic twentieth-century metropolis, a pioneer in council housing, public enterprise, socialist design, radical local democracy and multiculturalism. This book charts the development of this municipal power base under leaders from Herbert Morrison to Ken Livingstone, and its destruction in 1986, leaving a gap which has been only very inadequately filled by the Greater London Authority under Livingstone, Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan. Opposing currently fashionable bullshit about an imaginary "metropolitan elite", this book makes a case for London pride on the left, and makes an argument for using that pride as a weapon against a government of suburban landlords that ruthlessly exploits Londoners.

An anatomy of failed-state Britain, by the author of A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherley skewered New Labour’s architectural legacy in all its witless swagger. Now, in the year of the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, he sets out to describe what the Coalition’s altogether different approach to economic mismanagement and civic irresponsibility is doing to the places where the British live. In a journey that begins and ends in the capital, Hatherley takes us from Plymouth and Brighton to Belfast and Aberdeen, by way of the eerie urbanism of the Welsh valleys and the much-mocked splendour of modernist Coventry. Everywhere outside the unreal Southeast, the building has stopped in towns and cities, which languish as they wait for the next bout of self-defeating austerity. Hatherley writes with unrivalled aggression about the disarray of modern Britain, and yet this remains a book about possibilities remembered, about unlikely successes in the midst of seemingly inexorable failure. For as well as trash, ancient and modern, Hatherley finds signs of the hopeful country Britain once was and hints of what it might become.

From Evelyn Waugh to P. G. Wodehouse and Lawrence Durrell, a sweeping celebration of literature set in and inspired by the suburbs of London. The London suburbs have, for more than two hundred and fifty years, fired the creative literary imagination: whether this is Samuel Johnson hiding away in bucolic preindustrial Streatham, Italo Svevo cheering on Charlton Athletic Football Club down at The Valley, or Angela Carter hymning the joyful “wrongness” of living south-of-the-river in Brixton. From Richmond to Rainham, Cockfosters to Croydon, this sweeping literary tour of the thirty-two London Boroughs describes how writers, from the seventeenth century on, have responded to and fictionally reimagined London’s suburbs. It introduces us to the great suburban novels, such as Hanif Kureishi’s Bromley-set The Buddha of Suburbia, Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book, and Zadie Smith’s NW. It also reveals the lesser-known short stories, diaries, poems, local guides, travelogues, memoirs, and biographies, which together show how these communities have long been closely observed, keenly remembered, and brilliantly imagined.

Militant Modernism is a defence against Modernism's many detractors. It looks at design, film and architecture - especially architecture — and pursues the notion of an evolved modernism that simply refuses to stop being necessary. Owen Hatherley gives us new ways to look at what we thought was familiar — Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier, even Vladimir Mayakovsky. Through Hatherley's eyes we see all of the quotidian modernists of the 20th century - lesser lights, too — perhaps understanding them for the first time. Whether we are looking at Britain's brutalist aesthetics, Russian Constructivism, or the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich, the message is clear. There is no alternative to Modernism.

If we remember them at all, the Sheffield pop group Pulp are remembered for jolly class warfare ditty 'Common People', for the celebrity of their interestingly-named frontman, for the latter waving his arse at Michael Jackson at the Brit awards, for being part of a non-movement called 'Britpop', and for disappearing almost without trace shortly after. They made a few good tunes, they did some funny videos, and while they might be National Treasures, they're nothing serious. Are they? This book argues that they should be taken seriously —very seriously indeed. Attempting to wrest Pulp away from the grim jingoistic spectacle of Britpop and the revivals-of-a-revival circuit, this book charts the very strange things that occur in their records, taking us deep into a strange exotic land; a land of acrylics, adultery, architecture, analogue synthesisers and burning class anger. This is book about pop music, but it is mainly a book about sex, the city and class via the 1990s finest British pop group.