A Gazetteer

Modern Buildings in Britain

The definitive illustrated guide to modern British architecture returns in a beautiful new edition 
 
Modernism is now a century old, and its consequences are all around us, built into our everyday lived environments. Its place in Britain&rsquo;s history is fiercely contested, and its role in our future is the subject of ongoing controversy &ndash; but modernist buildings have undoubtedly changed our cities, politics and identity forever. 
In Modern Buildings in Britain, Owen Hatherley applauds the ambition and explores the significance of this most divisive of architectures, travelling from Aberystwyth to Aberdeen, from St Ives to Shetland, in search of our most important and distinctive modern buildings. As Hatherley considers the social, political and cultural value of these structures &ndash; a number of which are threatened by demolition &ndash; two linked questions emerge: what happens to a building after it has been lived in, and what becomes of an idea when its time has passed? 
With more than six hundred pages of trenchantly opinionated, often witty analysis, and with three hundred photographs in both duotone and colour, Modern Buildings in Britain is a landmark contribution to the history of British architecture.

The latest instalment in one of the most extraordinary oeuvres in writing about space and form, and a welcome antidote to the pre-industrial phantasmagoria of the new monarch

Owen Hatherley, long an eloquent proselytiser for municipal Modernism, has produced a new Britannica for our era of reassessment... Hatherley has superbly documented a moment in which we are rapidly losing what many have only just learnt to appreciate

It is an addictive book to dip in and out of, to open at random to learn something new. ... an approachable guide... Hatherley's introduction is possibly the most lucid and concise history of modern architecture in Britain you will find anywhere

Insightful and inspiring... One of its strengths is the devotion and persistence with which Owen Hatherley has sought out gems across the country... [A] phenomenal work of gathering and observation

Owen Hatherley is something of a phenomenon... Hatherley is a "béton brut" Ruskin for the twenty-first century... The book is a triumph and a thrill ride. A great big doorstopper, it is a classy production generally, generously illustrated with Chris Matthews's superb photography... The historical overview in the introduction is a masterpiece of lucid, pithy explication'

A weighty, glossy gazetteer of the most significant British modernist buildings... Packed with pleasurable details... [Hatherley] is trenchant, never fawning; a provocateur, and a good one - and more entertaining than Nicholas Pevsner... He writes glorious contextual critiques... Emotional and affecting

A masterpiece. A book that distills an accumulated life's work of thinking, seeing and writing

Swashbuckling... A very considerable achievement... Being a gazetteer, this is a book to dip in and out of, and you will keep dipping in and out, it's an addictive process that is made easy to navigate

The best blueprint for understanding Britain's modern architecture... An erudite and informative new classic ... a book that is colossal in ambition, range, and achievement

A book that will get you excited about architecture

Those with more than a passing interest in modernism will have great fun planning excursions with the help of the book's geographically arranged chapters

Hatherley's urban perambulations are in the great tradition of some of the best writers on architecture and design... Over 600 pages, our author and guide present us with a very personal selection, seeking out the diamonds in the rough and finding just the right pithy observations to praise the unusual, while damning the neglect, philistinism, and opposition that often comes with the territory

A gorgeous treat... Hatherley is a flâneur with a cause. He incites his readers to engage, as he does, with what is 
around them, no matter how banal it may appear at first glance, and to take nothing for granted

Owen Hatherley writes for Architectural Review, the Guardian and the London Review of Books, among others. He is the author of several books, including Trans-Europe Express and Landscapes of Communism, and is the Culture Editor of Tribune.

Modernism is now a century old, and its consequences are all around us, built into our everyday lived environments. Its place in Britain&rsquo;s history is fiercely contested, and its role in our future is the subject of ongoing controversy &ndash; but modernist buildings have undoubtedly changed our cities, politics and identity forever. 
In Modern Buildings in Britain, Owen Hatherley applauds the ambition and explores the significance of this most divisive of architectures, travelling from Aberystwyth to Aberdeen, from St Ives to Shetland, in search of our most important and distinctive modern buildings. As Hatherley considers the social, political and cultural value of these structures &ndash; a number of which are threatened by demolition &ndash; two linked questions emerge: what happens to a building after it has been lived in, and what becomes of an idea when its time has passed? 
With more than six hundred pages of trenchantly opinionated, often witty analysis, and with three hundred photographs in both duotone and colour, Modern Buildings in Britain is a landmark contribution to the history of British architecture.

Tours of a Lost Continent

Trans-Europe Express

A scathing, lively and timely look at the "European city", from one of our most provocative voices on culture and architecture today

The best book I've read on Europe, blending history, architecture and contemporary politics and written in Owen Hatherley's trademark mixture of scepticism, erudition and humanity. He is a writer of lasting merit who will be read fifty years from now.

Owen Hatherley writes regularly on aesthetics and politics for the Architectural Review, The Calvert Journal, Dezeen, the Guardian, Jacobin and the London Review of Books. He is the author of several books, most recently Landscapes of Communism, The Ministry of Nostalgia and The Chaplin Machine.

Over the past twenty years European cities have become the envy of the world: a Kraftwerk Utopia of historic centres, supermodernist concert halls, imaginative public spaces and futuristic egalitarian housing estates which, interconnected by high-speed trains traversing open borders, have a combination of order and pleasure which is exceptionally unusual elsewhere. 
 
In Trans-Europe Express, Owen Hatherley sets out to explore the European city across the entire continent, to see what exactly makes it so different to the Anglo-Saxon norm - the unplanned, car-centred, developer-oriented spaces common to the US, Ireland, UK and Australia. Attempting to define the European city, Hatherley finds a continent divided both within the EU and outside it.

A History Through Buildings

Landscapes of Communism

'In the craven world of architectural criticism Hatherley is that rarest of things: a brave, incisive, elegant and erudite writer, whose books dissect the contemporary built environment to reveal the political fantasies and social realities it embodies' Will Self 
 
During the course of the twentieth century, communism took power in Eastern Europe and remade the city in its own image. Ransacking the urban planning of the grand imperial past, it set out to transform everyday life, its sweeping boulevards, epic high-rise and vast housing estates an emphatic declaration of a non-capitalist idea. Now, the regimes that built them are dead and long gone, but from Warsaw to Berlin, Moscow to post-Revolution Kiev, the buildings, their most obvious legacy, remain, populated by people whose lives were scattered and jeopardized by the collapse of communism and the introduction of capitalism. 
 
Landscapes of Communism is an intimate history of twentieth-century communist Europe told through its buildings; it is, too, a book about power, and what power does in cities. Most of all, Landscapes of Communism is a revelatory journey of discovery, plunging us into the maelstrom of socialist architecture. As we submerge into the metros, walk the massive, multi-lane magistrale and pause at milk bars in the microrayons, who knows what we might find?

Can one talk yet of vintage Hatherley? Yes, one can. Here are all the properties that have made him one of the most distinctive writers in England - not just 'architectural writers', but  writers full stop: acuity, contrariness, observational rigour, frankness and beautifully wrought prose. This is a tempered  love letter to eastern Europe and a fullblown love letter to an eastern European woman. I can't think of anything remotely akin

Hatherley is the most informed, opinionated and acerbic guide you could wish for.

Owen Hatherley

Owen Hatherley turns to a gentler kind of insurgency in The Alienation Effect – a group biography of the architects, designers and directors from Mitteleuropa who washed up on Britain’s shores in the middle of the last century. We already know the assimilated conservatives – Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper – but Hatherley gives us the forgotten radicals who put concrete into our skyline and shook us out of our complacency

Guardian, Best History and Politics Books 2025

Impassioned and erudite, Hatherley writes with panache and never becomes flat-footedly ideological... In drawing attention to a hugely important yet neglected phenomenon that has shaped our culture for better and worse, this is a genuinely important study that deserves to win prizes

Meticulously researched... Hatherley is an exhilarating guide

Hatherley writes with wit throughout as he charts the tragic and comic turns of the lives of émigrés with a warm familiarity and affection. With his sharp eye for what lies beneath the mundane, he reveals how Central Europeans influenced the everyday apparatus of British cultural life... The Alienation Effect reveals just how tightly the foreign is woven into the fabric of the familiar

The radicalism of the émigrés, Hatherley convincingly shows, has been concealed by the manipulations of national memory... Aby Warburg’s credo was Kulturwissenschaft, a scientific approach to cultural studies that turned on connections and juxtapositions. Hatherley is a worthy heir to that tradition, and he has a canny eye for lineages. His potted genealogies are dazzling performances in concision, effortlessly gliding from the new brutalism of his home patch of Camberwell, London, through the works of art historian Rudolf Wittkower to the 15th-century Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti – all in a single page

Hatherley, whose background is in writing about architecture, moves with confidence through the fields of film, typography and art. The book is thick with information, sometimes resembling the gazetteers or guides he has previously written... It’s often acute, informative, passionate and witty, a sometimes moving tribute to achievements in the face of adversity, and an essential antidote to crude theories of national identity

Hatherley offers a set of vivid and consistently stimulating portraits of individual artists and thinkers… This is an admirable book, ambitious in its scope and very readable… Hatherley proves himself a fair-minded historian, capable of intellectual generosity even towards people and traditions he deplores… This book will stimulate readers

A combination of jewel-like detail and panoramic sweep… Arresting… This monumental work secures for Hatherley his place in the tradition of English writers who have moralized about architecture, a lineage stretching from John Ruskin to Ian Nairn and, yes, Pevsner… A passionate, erudite book

The book I’ve been waiting for. A masterpiece

A brilliant work of history. Owen Hatherley makes a fierce and elegant case for British culture as a living tapestry made ever brighter by newcomers to our strange island

How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century

In the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans sought sanctuary from fascism in Britain. While the rainy, seemingly quaint island they discovered on arrival was a far cry from the dynamism of Weimar Berlin or Red Vienna, it was safe, and it became home. Yet the émigrés had not arrived alone: they brought with them new and radical ideas, and as they began to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, they transformed the face of Britain forever.Drawing on an immense cast of artists and intellectuals, including celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger, forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass, and a host of larger-than-life visionaries and charlatans, the historian Owen Hatherley argues that in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, our imaginations were fundamentally realigned and remade for the better. In casting what Bertolt Brecht called, in a new German word, a Verfremdungseffekt, an ‘alienation effect’, on Britain, the aliens made us all a little bit alien too.Provocative, entertaining and meticulously researched, The Alienation Effect opens our eyes to the influence of the émigrés all around us – many of our most quintessentially British icons are the product of this culture clash – and entreats us to remember and renew our proud national tradition of asylum.

Owen Hatherley

Praise for The Alienation Effect

Owen Hatherley turns to a gentler kind of insurgency in The Alienation Effect – a group biography of the architects, designers and directors from Mitteleuropa who washed up on Britain’s shores in the middle o ...

Impassioned and erudite, Hatherley writes with panache and never becomes flat-footedly ideological... In drawing attention to a hugely important yet neglected phenomenon that has shaped our culture for better and wo ...

Meticulously researched... Hatherley is an exhilarating guide

Owen Hatherley turns to a gentler kind of insurgency in The Alienation Effect – a group biography of the architects, designers and directors from Mitteleuropa who washed up on Britain’s shores in the middle o ...

Impassioned and erudite, Hatherley writes with panache and never becomes flat-footedly ideological... In drawing attention to a hugely important yet neglected phenomenon that has shaped our culture for better and wo ...

Meticulously researched... Hatherley is an exhilarating guide

Owen Hatherley turns to a gentler kind of insurgency in The Alienation Effect – a group biography of the architects, designers and directors from Mitteleuropa who washed up on Britain’s shores in the middle o ...

Impassioned and erudite, Hatherley writes with panache and never becomes flat-footedly ideological... In drawing attention to a hugely important yet neglected phenomenon that has shaped our culture for better and wo ...

Meticulously researched... Hatherley is an exhilarating guide

Books by Owen Hatherley

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