Owen Hatherley: Ministry of Nostalgia

Gill sans, muted colours, Blitz spirit, crown logos, wartime cooking, duplicate ration cards...


'Austerity Britain', the period roughly from the 1940s until around 1955, when rationing was finally lifted by a Conservative government, is the direct opposite of ‘Austerity Britain’ Mark Two, the period from 2009/10 until the present when a financial crisis caused by property speculation and ‘derivatives’ culminated in massive state bailouts of the largest banks, followed by an assault on what remained of the public sphere after thirty years of neoliberalism. But this most recent austerity has nonetheless been overlaid with the imagery of that earlier era. At times this has been so pervasive that it felt as if parts of the country began to resemble a strange, dreamlike reconstruction of the 1940s and 1950s, reassembled in the wrong order.


So what emerges particularly clearly from all of this is that austerity - in terms here of developers and investors wanting safety and predictability - has pushed much of the very fabric of London towards an austerity-nostalgic aesthetic. Whereas in very recent memory London seemed to want to look like Dubai-on-Thames, it now increasingly resembles a cross between Islington in the 1820s and Poplar in the 1950s, two moments of austerity and rectitude. [...] Boris Johnson hasn’t the power and certainly hasn’t the will to build thousands of new council flats in London, but what he and his administration have managed to do is help developers build thousands of luxury flats which look like council flats, and can appear to be ‘in keeping’ with them.


In Britain today we are living through exactly the kind of housing crisis for which council housing was invented in the first place, at exactly the same as we’re alternately fetishising and privatising its remnants. From substandard speculative housing development to runaway inflation of mortgages and rents, from resurrected Rachmanism to houses in garden sheds and garages, from empty flats in the north to neo-Victorian overcrowding in the south, from a forced exodus due to to unemployment in one city to a forced exodus due to house prices and rents in another, we face a massive problem for which, once, the solution was the building of well-designed, well-considered, well-planned modernist buildings, often erected on the ashes of shoddily-designed, unplanned, badly made, profit driven housing of the past. Instead, what is actually happening is that we’re transforming the surviving fragments of that solution into one of the main contributors to the problem, as social housing becomes the new front of gentrification, and the architect-designed modernist flat the new loft conversion.


... an architecture voided of its original content - at the very moment when it is most needed.