Owen Hatherley
, April 17th, 2021 08:57
Owen Hatherley interviews Jonathan Meades about his new book
Pedro and Ricky Come Again, a massive collection of his writing from 1988 to 2021 – and on why he’s no longer making television
Photo by Pablosievert. CC BY-SA 4.0
The last time I saw Jonathan Meades was in May 2018, in Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. In a flat surrounded with books, paintings, pictures, and postcards he’d made himself, and as we got through several bottles of rosé, he said he wasn’t fit enough to come up to the building’s famously sculptural roof terrace, with its running track, its kindergarten, and its view across the city, the mountains and the Mediterranean. Although he wasn’t able to leave his flat at the time, he was still planning another film in his informal series for the BBC on the architecture of 20th century dictatorships –