Owen Hatherley, Iain Nairn, and the Afterlife of Britain
I am ashamed to say that I only recently discovered Iain Nairn. His name was familiar, invoked by better-read critics as a kind of lost voice of British urbanism, but I had never properly read or watched him. Then I did, and it was like a slap to the senses. Nairn’s London (1966) and Britain’s Changing Towns (1967) are not just architectural guides; they are acts of rage, desperate pleas to take Britain’s built environment seriously. His great enemy was what he called subtopia—a creeping tide of blandness, the dissolution of character in the name of expediency, the reduction of cities to a grey porridge of forgettable development.
What struck me, though, was that his subtopia, that great homogenising tide he despised, has changed many times over. The monotony of ribbon developments and speculative suburban housing that he railed against in the 1950s and 60s has long since given way to something even worse. Britain no longer builds even mediocre places at scale. Instead, we have privatised and financialised what remains, offering up the city itself as a speculative asset rather than a site of collective life.
And it was through Nairn that I felt the need to revisit A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010) and A New Kind of Bleak (2012), Owen Hatherley’s devastating accounts of Britain’s urban and architectural failures. I had read them before, but now, in the light of Nairn’s furious, almost desperate style, I wanted to read them again. And what struck me most, this time, was how much Hatherley belongs to the same lineage.
Hatherley, is, in many ways, Nairn’s spiritual successor. But the Britain he documents is in a far worse state than the one Nairn lamented. Where Nairn fought against a culture of bureaucratic mediocrity, Hatherley is chronicling something much bleaker: the conscious dismantling of public life, the transformation of architecture into nothing more than a financial instrument, the deliberate ruin of a country that once, briefly, believed in itself.
The Ruins of Modernity
Hatherley’s Guide to the New Ruins takes us on a tour of Britain’s cities, from Southampton to Sheffield, from Teesside to Tyneside, seeking out the traces of lost futures. And what he finds is wreckage, not the picturesque remnants of medieval or Victorian grandeur, but the ruins of modernity itself.
“We’re here as an appropriate entry into a country which, from 1997 to 2010, was supposedly going to create a new and better landscape, but produced instead the purgatory around Luton Airport, and the many places like it.” (A New Kind of Bleak)
Hatherley’s enemy is not simply bad architecture. It is the politics that produces it. Thatcherism decimated Britain’s urban fabric; New Labour offered, at best, a superficially progressive gloss over the same neoliberal logic. The PFI hospitals, the ‘mixed tenure’ housing developments, the endless ‘luxury’ flats that no one can afford to live in, these are the real ruins of Britain, the built expressions of a country that has abandoned the very idea of public investment.
Nowhere is this clearer than in housing. The post-war era, for all its compromises, at least tried to build decent homes for ordinary people. By the time Hatherley was writing, that ambition had long since given way to pure speculation. The Pathfinder scheme, New Labour’s flagship ‘housing market renewal’ policy, was, in reality, a programme of social cleansing:
“The architectural argument misses the truly original element in Pathfinder… It is a programme of class cleansing.” (A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain)
What Hatherley describes is not just decline, but something more deliberate. Where Nairn mourned the slow encroachment of the forgettable, Hatherley documents a landscape where destruction is policy.
Nairn on Film
It is impossible to talk about Nairn without talking about his films. His BBC documentaries, Nairn’s North, Nairn’s Europe, Nairn Across Britain, are, even today, essential viewing. He is at his best on screen, setting off in his car, a singular presence: dishevelled, later possibly a pint in hand, voice thick with anger or awe, whether mourning the vandalism of English townscapes or marvelling at a well-made railway station.
What is most striking, watching them now, is how much his concerns still hold. The programmes might date from the 1960s and 70s, but the themes remain urgent: the failure of imagination in British planning, the slow destruction of what made towns and cities distinctive, the willingness to accept mediocrity. And yet, in their strange, melancholic way, they are almost hopeful. Nairn believed that Britain could do better. He still thought the country might rediscover its ambition.
Hatherley, writing in the wake of neoliberalism’s total victory, knows better than to expect that.
Bleak Futures
If A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain was a tour of Blairite failure, A New Kind of Bleak is something even worse: the first glimpse of a Britain where even the Blairite gloss is gone. Written during the early years of the Tory–Lib Dem coalition, it is a book about what happens when neoliberalism no longer feels the need to disguise itself.
“The more general funding squeeze on local government, hitting poor and inner urban areas disproportionately, means that cities will be left to do what they did throughout the 1980s and 1990s – contract, decline, and slowly die.” (A New Kind of Bleak)
Austerity, which had only just begun when Hatherley was writing, is now complete. Local councils collapse into bankruptcy; public buildings are sold off for private development; the very idea of civic infrastructure is fading into myth.
Even the ostensible ‘successes’ of contemporary British architecture, London’s skyline, filled with absurdly named towers, are hollow victories. Hatherley skewers the way contemporary British architecture has been reduced to branding:
“While it’s possible that the original Gherkin received its nickname spontaneously, there’s little doubt that the other towers… had a ready-made little moniker designed to immediately endear them to the general public.”
Where Nairn saw subtopia, Hatherley sees something more insidious: a Britain where public life itself has been turned into a commodity.
The Next Round of Betrayal
The new New Labour government will not deliver on its promise to build sufficient and affordable housing. That much is already clear. The rhetoric is there, pledges to “get Britain building,” threats to NIMBYs, vague talk of making the planning system more “flexible”but we have heard all this before. And we know how it ends.
The plan, as it stands, is not to build the mass council housing that Britain so desperately needs. It is not to expropriate the obscene number of empty properties hoarded by speculators. It is not to cap rents, expand tenants’ rights, or challenge the fundamental logic that treats housing as an asset rather than a necessity. Instead, the government will do what every government of the last forty years has done: tweak planning laws to benefit developers, hand more land over to private capital, and hope that something affordable trickles down. It won’t.
The promise to rip up planning legislation will do what it always does. It will benefit the rich, the asset owners, the landlords. But it will do nothing for the millions trapped in overpriced, insecure housing. The UK is not short of housing, it is short of affordable housing, of housing that is not a vehicle for capital accumulation. And yet every ‘solution’ proposed by Labour, like the Tories before them, starts from the assumption that developers will build for need rather than profit. They won’t.
We have seen this pattern unfold before. Remember Pathfinder from earlier? New Labour’s housing market renewal programme, was framed as a way to ‘revitalise’ housing in the North. What it actually did was demolish perfectly serviceable homes, displace working-class communities, and hand vast swathes of land over to private developers. The result? Higher rents, higher house prices, fewer genuinely affordable homes.
The same logic applies today. Loosening planning restrictions does not guarantee social housing. It does not force developers to build well, or even at all. If anything, it speeds up speculation: developers sit on land, waiting for prices to rise; luxury flats go up where council housing should be; landlords expand their portfolios while renters are left to fight over the scraps.
Hatherley has already documented what this looks like in practice. The ‘Urban Renaissance’ of the late 90s and 2000s was supposed to bring life back to Britain’s cities. What it actually did was create a network of privatised ‘public’ spaces, empty flats marketed to overseas investors, and an ever-deepening housing crisis. He saw this pattern unfolding in Manchester, where ‘regeneration’ simply meant new towers full of unaffordable apartments; in London, where entire districts were transformed into financial assets; in cities across the country, where the state withdrew and let the market run riot.
The next round will be no different. The new New Labour government will tinker with planning laws, allowing even more speculative development, while pretending that this is somehow an attack on landlords and asset-hoarders rather than another gift to them. They will not build the council housing we need, because to do so would mean confronting the fundamental failure of the British housing model—a model built on rising house prices, on an economy dependent on property speculation, on the idea that a home is an investment first and a place to live second.
There is an alternative, but it is one that neither Labour nor the Tories will ever embrace. The state could build again, at scale, as it did in the post-war years. It could impose rent controls, expand tenants’ rights, and break the landlord class. It could reassert the idea that housing is a public good, not a private commodity. But that would mean confronting the people who actually hold power in Britain: the property developers, the landlords, the financial institutions that rely on an inflated housing market.
Instead, we will get another cycle of ‘reform’, another set of policies that claim to solve the housing crisis while entrenching the conditions that created it. More speculation, more privatisation, more empty towers, more working-class people priced out of the cities they once built.
The ruins Hatherley wrote about more than a decade ago are still here. And the next new New Labour government is about to build more of them.
What Remains?
Hatherley, like Nairn before him, does not offer solutions. His books are not manifestos, nor are they blueprints for an alternative Britain. But they do something equally important: they document, they remember, they refuse to let us forget that everything, every ruin, every failing hospital, every gutted council estate, is the result of choices.
Nairn wrote in the hope that Britain might rediscover its ambition, that it might shake off its mediocrity and build something worth living in. Hatherley, writing in the wreckage of neoliberalism, knows better than to expect that. But he also knows that cities are shaped by people, and that if they can be dismantled, they can be rebuilt.
If Nairn is anything to go by, voices like Hatherley’s, writing here, about an earlier period, never entirely fade. They remain, cutting through the smog of indifference, refusing to let Britain accept its decline as inevitable.
Hatherley shows us what went wrong.
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