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"Why should we have to "Keep Calm and Carry On"? In this sharp, witty polemic, award-winning critic Owen Hatherley questions the many ways we have adopted the gospel of luxurious poverty: from ubiquitous "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters, the commercialization of thrift, the added value of the artisanal, and the selling of a "make do and mend" aesthetic, to a nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed. Hatherley proposes a radical demand for true abundance for all, not just adopting the veneer of a better age. The Ministry of Nostalgia is a rallying cry that reaches across a depleted cultural landscape and refuses to accept that we need to lower our expectations and hopes to fit difficult times. Instead, he demands more because that is what we all deserve"--

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 aw

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

Britain is the one major European country never to have had a numerically significant Communist movement, with Marxism generally limited either to far-left enclaves in Wales and Scotland, Labour Party entryism or, most commonly, academia. However, the Labour movement at its more radical edges has produced numerous monuments, memorials and spaces, littered around urban and even rural Britain. Typically, they are monuments to defeat, given the lack of any hegemonic socialism in Britain. They are also unusually figurative for 20th century public sculpture, suggesting a perhaps unexpected traditionalism, not usually considered to be the case for the 'west', in the Cold War polarities often used to analyse monumental artworks. This paper will discuss these narratives of heroic failure as expressed in mosaics, murals, sculptures and plaques in South Wales, the north of England and London as attempts to answer the question of what socialist memorials are like in a country without even historical socialism. ; Velika Britanija jedna je od istaknutih europskih zemalja koja nikada nije imala brojčano značajniji komunistički pokret, dok je marksizam uglavnom bio ograničen na krajnje lijevo orijentirane enklave u Walesu i Škotskoj, infiltracije u Laburističku stranku ili najčešće na akademsku zajednicu. Međutim, radnički pokret u svojim radikalnijim oblicima proizveo je brojne spomenike, memorijalne komplekse i prostore razbacane po urbanim pa čak i ruralnim sredinama Velike Britanije. Najčešće su to spomenici porazu, uzme li se u obzir odsutnost bilo kakvoga hegemonijskog socijalizma u državi. Jednako tako, neobično su figurativni u odnosu na javne skulpture karakteristične za 20. stoljeće te upućuju na donekle neočekivani tradicionalizam kakav se obično ne povezuje sa Zapadom u okviru polariteta Hladnog rata, na kojima se često temelji analiza spomeničkog stvaralaštva. Ovaj rad razmatra naracije o herojskim neuspjesima izražene u obliku mozaika, murala, skulptura i spomen-ploča u južnom Walesu, na sjeveru Engleske te u Londonu, u nastojanju da odgovori na pitanje kako izgledaju socijalistički spomenici u zemlji u kojoj socijalizam u povijesnom smislu nikad nije zaživio.

The Northern Powerhouse is an ambitious-sounding plan to revitalize the north of England and create a unified region to rival London. Architectural critic and author Owen Hatherley, however, contends that the Conservative Party's development strategy mistakenly treats the north as a single entity, and the fiercely independent cities are unlikely to come together.

AbstractThe reappraisal of the post‐Soviet landscape is in danger of overlooking two of its most important elements: firstly, the mass modernist housing that was more extensive here than probably anywhere else; and secondly, the post‐1989 capitalist context of property speculation, office development and decay. These routinely missed landscapes constitute the very things travelled through on the way to utopian, if ruined, monuments, such as those documented in Frédéric Chaubin's CCCP — Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed. When visited, the surroundings of these structures turn out to be at least as interesting as the photogenic modernist monument itself. This essay is an account of a visit to one of the most architecturally contemporary of these structures — the Park of Memory crematoria in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, designed by Abraham Miletsky in 1974. In Chaubin's photographs, the curling concrete volumes of the Park's central crematoria are flamboyant, fantastical and self‐referential, the very 'iconic' architecture that many post‐Soviet capitals would like to have in order to attract tourists. There is a lot more going on in the surrounding city than what is typically recorded in its visual representations, however, as discussed in this essay. Such monuments are not mute, and cannot be severed from their surroundings.

The Weimar-Republic, and the modernist architecture and planning that was born there, is still a contested place, from whence liberals, reactionaries and Marxists can all trace their lineage. Sabine Hake's Topographies of Class attempts to clarify this contestation, through an interdisciplinary study of the modernist geography of the interwar-capital, Berlin. The book offers many new insights into the Weimar-era city, countering a tendency on the Left to reject the twentieth-century city in favour of the romanticised 'capitals of the nineteenth century', with their insurgent proletariat and their lushly ornamented boulevards. Topographies of Class is a reminder that, irrespective of the era's rejection of ornament and romanticism, it was a site of class-struggle as intense as that of the Paris of the 1870s. However, Hake's study is dominated by a conception of class as an 'identity', akin to the identity-politics of race or gender, leading to an argument centred on the suppression or expression of 'class-difference' rather than class-struggle. In the process, her reading of the city's modernism becomes overly one-sided, as a period of tension between labour and capital is read, under the influence of Manfredo Tafuri and Italian post-Marxist architectural theory, as being governed almost solely by the logic of Fordist capital.