Finding solid ground: gateways to municipal socialism socialeurope.eu - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from socialeurope.eu Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London
by Owen Hatherley
Repeater Books, 2020, 266 pp.
Few tourists strolling the south bank of the Thames in London realize that they are going through a carefully constructed showcase for what Owen Hatherley describes in his new book,
Red Metropolis: the structures and programs put in place when the political left ran Great Britainâs largest city. On one end of the procession sits County Hall, the massive, longtime home of the London city government, until the national government eliminated home rule and sold off the building. At the other end is a new City Hall, designed by Norman Foster, housing the current incarnation of the London government. In between lies a series of city-built cultural venuesâthe Royal Festival Hall, National Film Theatre, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Hayward Gallery, and National Theatreâand Oxo Tower Wharf, a mixed-use complex in an old power station, developed by a nonprofit cooperative with lo
London’s poorest risk becoming the new “left behind” The depiction of the capital as a gilded metropolis conceals the highest rate of child poverty of any English region. Nine years ago, as it prepared to host the 2012 Olympic Games, London basked in its global pre-eminence. The city had overcome postwar decline to become a political, economic and cultural powerhouse. “Effectively New York, LA and Washington all rolled into one,” as Neil O’Brien, the Conservative MP, observed that year. But London’s ascent would not last. In 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union and the capital was marginalised as the only English region to back Remain (with a 60-40 split).
Owen Hatherley: “I really hoped that with Grenfell the ‘metropolitan elite’ debate would just die” The British writer and critic discusses his new book
Red Metropolis and the future of the urban left. To Londoners confronted with the vivid geography of the 2019 general election result, Labour’s defeat may have seemed to contain a personal rebuke. The Conservatives, commentators agreed, were gifted an 80-seat majority because Labour had “lost touch” with its “traditional heartlands” in the post-industrial Midlands and the North. Its electorally irrelevant landslide in London, on the other hand – where Labour gained its only seat, Putney – was delivered by a Europhilic “metropolitan elite”, whose progressive voting habits were a kind of “cultural luxury”.
AJ Climate Champions podcast: Owen Hatherley on Modernism + Will Hurst explains RetroFirst
In a bonus episode of the AJ’s podcast series, we talk to Owen Hatherley about the retrofitting of Modernist buildings and to the AJ’s Will Hurst about our RetroFirst campaign
Author and critic Hatherley describes approaches to the retrofit of Modernist buildings, lessons learned from post-Soviet housing and why he thinks White Design’s straw-bale Lilac Cohousing in Leeds could be a replicable new-build approach.
Hurst explains the tactics and ambitions of the AJ’s RetroFirst campaign, from engaging with MPs to raising public awareness, as well as the policy levers necessary to prioritise retrofit.