Owen Hatherley

Hatherley was born in Southampton in 1981, growing up in a 1930s suburban estate. He describes his parents as "trots" who were members of Militant.[2] [3] At the age of 12, he moved to the Flowers Estate in Bassett Green, which he disliked, later saying: "I couldn't wait to get out of the sodding place, and the pitched roofs and front gardens didn’t exactly relieve the unpleasantness."[4] When he was 16, he read England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage, which inspired him to move to London to study.[5] He studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, graduating in 2001.[6] He then received a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London in 2011.[7]

Hatherley's first book, Militant Modernism, was published by Zero Books in 2009. The Guardian described the book as an "intelligent and passionately argued attempt to 'excavate utopia' from the ruins of modernism" and an "exhilarating manifesto for a reborn socialist modernism".[8] Icon described the book as "sparky, polemical and ferociously learned" although it "falters a little towards the end";[9] while Jonathan Meades in the New Statesman described the book as a "deflected Bildungsroman of a very clever, velvet-gloved provocateur nostalgic for yesterday's tomorrow, for a world made before he was born, a distant, preposterously optimistic world which, even though it still exists in scattered fragments, has had its meaning erased, its possibilities defiled" and Hatherley "as a commentator on architecture...in a school of one".[10] The journal Planning Perspectives suggested that the book "nicely explores the irony of the potential status of the remains of future-oriented architecture and urban design as ‘modern heritage'".[11]

His book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain was published by Verso in 2010.[12] Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings, a history of communism in Europe told through the built environments of former socialist states, was published by Allen Lane in June 2015.[13] In 2018, he released two books, Trans-Europe Express with Allen Lane, and The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space with Repeater Books.[14]

Hatherley has written for Dezeen, Building Design, The Guardian, Icon, the London Review of Books, New Humanist, the New Statesman, Socialist Review, Socialist Worker and Jacobin Magazine. He has maintained three blogs, Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy, The Measures Taken and Kino Fist.

Hatherley has described himself as a communist "at least in the sense in which the word was used in The Communist Manifesto". He wrote that "revolution might be a rather exciting thing, one that would transform the world, and transform space, for the better. Worth doing. Why not try it."[15]

• Militant Modernism (Zero Books, 2009)
• A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010)
• Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp (Zero Books, 2011)
• A New Kind of Bleak (Verso, 2012)
• Landscapes of Communism (Allen Lane, 2015)
• The Ministry of Nostalgia (Verso, 2016)
• The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde (Pluto Press, 2016)
• Trans-Europe Express (Allen Lane, 2018)
• The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space (Repeater Books, 2018)
• Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London (Repeater Books, 2020)
• Editor of The Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs for Open House London (2020)

• 3:AM interview
• An interview with Owen Hatherley by Alex Niven in the Oxonian Review, October 2010
• Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy
• Owen Hatherley on Diffusion.org.uk – 'A History of Municipal Housing' and 'In the Shadow of Senate House'
• 'Olympian Landscape' in Guernica
• An interview with Owen Hatherley on Notebook on Cities and Culture