Must we now despise colonial architecture too?

Here’s a thing. A disturbing book about disturbing cities. And it’s full of loaded questions. Like Hezbollah, the publisher uses the silhouette of an automatic weapon as its logo. This is a trigger warning.

Jonathan Swift wrote:

All poets and philosphers who find  Some favourite system to their minds  In every way to make it fit  Will force all Nature to submit.

So I give you Owen Hatherley, an architectural critic of the left, adept in the predictable tropes of Guardian-sprache, who exists in a world, as he often tells us, defined by concepts of colonial domination, exploitation and ocean-going misery. As Lionel Trilling observed, leftish people are always glum because things are never quite as perfect as they wish them. Rightish people have more fun. If you don’t want to read about ‘on-going imperial wars’, look away now.

Hatherley’s subject is the architecture of the ‘trans-oceanic white settler superstate’ of CANZUK – Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK. Imperial overreach led to many absurdities, described here with disapproval rather than amused wonder: Queen Victoria’s Osborne House on the Isle of Wight is reproduced in Brisbane, Auckland and Montreal. Melbourne has suburbs called Croydon and Notting Hill. Why? Because, in the Hatherley Version, the dominant global culture imposed itself on innocent primitives and ‘forcibly seized’ their territories. An awful lot of forcible seizing goes on in this book. It is a jargon-heavy moan of the perpetually dispossessed.

Hatherley writes spirited walkabout conversations with cities – not as nocturnally baroque as Jonathan Meades, nor as beery and amusing as Ian Nairn. His account of Australia leans heavily on Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness, a marvellous and original book.