I met Mark for the first time in a pub, in north London, where there was a panel discussion launching Simon Reynolds's Rip it Up and Start Again. For a few years at this point I had been reading K-Punk, religiously, for writing of a sort that wasn't supposed to exist anymore, and that elsewhere, off the internet, largely didn't. Working as a filing clerk for T Brown and Sons Heating Engineers, I would use a proxy server to wait for, and then read, the latest K-Punk post, many of which had the same sense of anticipation that you would have waiting for a new record, the next episode of some sort of dream-serial. Then you'd be rewarded, when just under the document you were meant to be working on, you could bring out something like his essay on Joy Division, his account of Fleetwood Mac via John Le Carre, and later, his astonishing series on The Fall. These names might make it all sound like one of those Rock History magazines, but K-Punk involved an entire canon, one where Japan's 'Tin Drum', Visage's second album, Gladys Knight's 'The Way We Were' were of more import than the entire collected works of Bob Dylan. I knew that 'Mark K-Punk' would be at the event, and given that I occasionally posted on the forum he'd set up, Dissensus, and had for a few weeks ran a deeply K-Punk derivative blog, I drank enough to feel confident enough to introduce myself. He knew who I was, was incredibly friendly, a man in his mid-30s with wiry, dyed pink hair and excellent dress sense. He suggested next time meeting somewhere else: 'I hate pubs'. This opinion, controversial enough, was followed by a discussion where he made abundantly clear he considered everything New Order did after Movement to be totally inferior.

From there, we became close friends. This was partly through blogging and through forums – he overrated what I did massively, but an idea was never left alone, always pulled into a constellation with others, and speaking to Mark made me a writer who took seriously what I did, as he did. A post on K-Punk, produced in his spare time, unpaid, was always far more finely wrought, considered and original than the hackwork people were and are habitually paid for. It helped that he lived nearby, I in Deptford, he in a flat in a rambling, subdivided Gothic house in Brockley, with a big, sinister pointed-arched door. People will write, rightly so, about how personable Mark was, how funny – and how much he found other people funny, how often he was laughing. But when I say this, it almost implies that there were two sides, the terrifying pop theory terminator and the friendly, animated football fan and superb cook. As if the first of those wasn't serious. I don't think he found those things remotely contrary, and however ferocious he could be online, he would have considered personal animosity not just petty, but irrelevant. Mark spoke as he wrote – part of what made him such a terrific public speaker – and would refer to something quite casually as 'delibidinising', or pepper his speech with the neologisms he would coin in K-Punk – 'interpassive', 'oed-i-pod', 'proleface', to denote the caricatures of working class culture that were and are dominant in the media ('legitimate concerns') and my favourite of all, spoken in a very slightly East Midlands-accented cackle, smugonaut. We would meet, several times a week, Mark, Joel, Nina, Dominic, Laura, Douglas, Bat, me, not in pubs, obviously, but in cafes, like Gambardella in Blackheath, Golden Fish in Farringdon, and most of all, in the New Piccadilly in Soho, whose yellow formica tables, googie lampshades and inedible SF menu were a spatial analogue of his concept of Pulp Modernism.

I learned, and it made perfect sense, that K-Punk had come out of a period of depression, as a means of getting out of it - it read as the reappearance of a voice that had been silenced, that had disappeared, as someone coming back to life. A decade before I knew him there was the CCRU, jungle, Warwick, an earlier, younger life. The world we created was an incredible solace during the apparently endless boom, the grinning Blairish optimism that danced on the grave of everything Mark held dear – a popular modernism that was miles from the 'pop' and 'rock' held up by cultural studies (another derisive cackle, cultstuds) as an alternative to theory and politics, but one which was theory and politics. A constantly morphing musical subculture, a working class dandyism (he longed for the day that working class youth would stop wearing sportswear), self-education, solidarity, hope that we as a society could do better than this. I had started blogging largely because I'd been diagnosed with a chronic illness, was in catastrophic debt, was mostly unemployed, and had no idea what my future looked like. Mark was such an inspiration because he had made his blogging a vengeful, resentment-driven (VIVA RESENTMENT!, ran one K-Punk headline) assault on a cultural and political world that seemed designed to make sure that someone like him was impossible. But again, this all sounds too personal; the point for him was the creation of a new network, something that would supplant and destroy the world of....well, you can fill in who, you know who they are, and they're still there. With the usual consonantal slip, it was about a Kollective.

Zero Books came out of this, in an uneasy relationship with a dubious mind body spirit publisher – control wasn't really achieved until he and Tariq Goddard set up Repeater Books, away from its auspices, but at the time, nobody else was going to publish anything like this. Each of the early books Zero put out is unimaginable without Mark's influence as interlocutor, inspiration and constant encouragement. The statement printed on each book, that relentlessly driven little mini-manifesto, was of course written by Mark, in such obviously K-Punk cadences – ''a cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive stupor' – what other publisher's mission statement not only includes a neologism the writer had just made up, but also made you want to stand up and cheer? And for a first book, rather than put together some things he'd already written, like the rest of us did, Mark instead wrote through a short book of breathtaking clarity and power, the K-Punk voice changed a little into something less stentorian, a humane, melancholic but eventually hopeful account of precisely how capitalism fucks us up. If anything, Mark grew as a writer after that – his blog posts on political figures like Gordon Brown and David Cameron showed an assured, dramatic political historian who could have made a career out of long duree cultural history. A short Compass pamphlet with Jeremy Gilbert showed that he could write extremely convincing thinktank reports if he wanted to.  There were projects that never happened: the radio collage on 1979, the book on football, the book on Grace Jones, a book on post-capitalist desire to be called 'Acid Communism'. What there is, both during and after K-Punk, is at its best on the level of Fredric Jameson or Walter Benjamin at their best. Often better, because while they wrote about pop culture and class consciousness from the outside, these were utterly intrinsic to Mark, immanent, the fibre of his being. 

It was always particularly exciting when Mark came across someone or something contemporary that was worthy of his ideas – David Peace, Burial, the Hunger Games. Caricatured as a miserablist, he was anything but, and sometimes he would overrate things so as to wish new movements into being, to will ways out, as if he could write them into existence; I think he saw the student protests, and the shift to the left in Labour, as vindication of his ideas, which they were. But I saw little of Mark in the last few years. He was in Suffolk, I was half the year in Warsaw. We would see each other intermittently, briefly; I would read his things, we would exchange short 'interactions' on social networks, that was it. I last saw him a year ago, at an event where he was in conversation with Andy Beckett, whose books on the 1970s and 1980s show how K-Punk's once-marginal hyperstitional-cyber-pop-theory had begun to influence the writing of history. My last happy memory is of around five years ago in Zagreb, where there was a Zero Books event. He, Douglas Murphy, Agata Pyzik and I walked round the city, with its crumbling socialist modernism and Hapsburg boulevards, in the worst fog I've ever seen, so thick you could barely see in front of you, a scene so K-Punkish it was hilarious, a readymade Kubrick set of ornate modernity, into which people would fade in and out like ghosts. We then came to a sign pointing to 'the museum of broken relationships' and collapsed into giggles. He did that a lot. I regret seeing him as little as I did in the last few years more than I can possibly express.

What is really happening at Preston?

In a situation where benefits are being decimated, estates cleared, the NHS privatised and urban planning regulations torn up, it's easy for politicians (and developers) to claim that architecture is a side-issue, of interest only to aesthetes (probably southern). So it might seem that the campaign to save Preston's Bus Station from demolition is a distraction from the issue of austerity and what the response to it should be - but, in fact, if there's a better illustration of how austerity works and how hopeless the Labour Party have been in opposing it, I can think of few better examples. But, first things first - the building itself. Preston Bus Station was designed in the late 1960s by local, later to be international architects Building Design Partnership. 'Bus Station' hardly covers what the building is. What we have here is a Bus Station and multi-storey car park, with a vast, airport-lounge like interior boasting cafes, newsagent, hairdresser (!) and so forth - a Public Building in the truest sense, taking a mundane thing and making it as comfortable and pleasing as possible, lack of maintenance notwithstanding. The finishes of the building - the wood, tiles and metal of the interior, the op-art concrete waves of the facade - are of the very highest quality. Nothing today, bar the most expensive 'signature' architecture, is this well-made. But being a good Public Building is not going to do a structure many favours today.

I've been trying to puzzle out what is exactly happening with the Bus Station on Procrastinator and to be honest I'm still none the wiser. For most of the 2000s the proposal was to demolish the station and replace it - and the surrounding area of the '60s Markets and office buildings built at the same time by RMJM and BDP - with Tithebarn, a 'mall without walls'. Always a strange idea in a declining city that already has two large malls, Tithebarn was an early casualty of the recession, effectively cancelled in 2011 when John Lewis pulled out. That seemed to give the place a reprieve - earlier this year, at a public tour and talk on the Bus Station, I spoke to a few local politicians and councillors*, who said that they were keen to keep the building - the only obstacle was Lancashire County Council, who wanted a new bus station built by the Railway Station. This idea, that it's in 'the wrong place', comes up a lot, although it's puzzling - it's ten minutes walk from the railway station, but right next to the Guildhall, the Markets, the magnificent Harris Museum and Art Gallery and the shopping centres, basically everything a non-Prestonian might want to see or do in Preston. Nonetheless, Lancs Council are apparently adamant that they will not fund a refurbishment (though it may be cheaper than demolition), so if the current building is demolished, there will (eventually) be a new bus station and LCC will (probably) be funding it. Here is what they want it to look like.

(image via Dominic Roberts)

Now you've got your breath back, I should point out that though this is what Lancs County Council want, they are not planning to do this anytime soon - they are not demanding the Bus Station be cleared out of the way. Why would they, when they want to build it somewhere else entirely? So the reason given is the cost of maintaining the current Bus Station. A recent costing puts this at £23 million, a bizarre figure - earlier estimates put it at £4 million, and even councillors concede the figure is probably around £10 million. £4 million is a lot of money, particularly when council budgets are being crushed in Eric Pickles' iron fist, but the fact is that the Bus Station costs £300,000 a year to run. Local socialist councillor Michael Lavalette estimates that a 50p increase in car park costs would pay for the building's annual maintenance. So all this suggests that someone, somewhere, wants a prohibitive figure put on the building so that they can make the we-are-protecting-services-not-buildings-for-ponces argument, to get rid of the Bus Station ASAP. What for, though? 

What is key here is that Preston City Council also voted to demolish RMJM's 1960s Market building adjacent. That is, the other council-owned part of the former Tithebarn site. Like the Bus Station, although not quite as architecturally stunning, the market is a good piece of civic design, and it is well-used. Nonetheless, the Preston City Council meeting that decided to demolish the Bus Station and markets met for a paltry 30 minutes. I'm sure a lot of people in the city and outside of it have talked more about the Bus Station on an average Monday than that. So it seems pretty obvious that a fix is in. What sort of a fix? Well, what the council want in place of the Bus Station, for the moment, is a surface car park. Given that there's already a cordon sanitaire of dead space between the Bus Station and the ring road, that means a vast, exurban empty space in the middle of the city, to deliberately create the sort of vast, anti-urban car-centred wasteland that has destroyed Southampton - only without the actual shopping mall those spaces serve. The city's idea appears to be - as far as I can tell - that they will carry out the programme of demolition that was meant to precede the Tithebarn scheme, giving them a big empty space that they can then sell to a developer at that mythical moment, When The Market Picks Up. That is, Preston is choosing to inflict on itself what Bradford now has, a huge bloody hole where it used to have a city centre. This, incidentally, is also what happened to Portsmouth City Council in 2004, when it demolished the Tricorn Centre, after a similar campaign that pit bluff, don't-know-a-lot-but-I-know-what-I-like councillors against local and national architecture enthusiasts, who proposed several plausible schemes for refurbishment, redesign and renewal to no avail. The Tricorn was replaced with a surface car park, on which a 'Northern Quarter' was meant to be built, when The Market was most definitely Up. 8 years later it hasn't been, but maybe When The Market Picks Up....

This is the fate that Preston is choosing to inflict on itself. If it's only a matter of Lancashire County Council's hostility, why are Preston so keen to frame it as being about the Bus Station's allegedly exorbitant expense? Unlike similar acts of philistinism, like Tower Hamlets' sell-offs of Robin Hood Gardens or Henry Moore's 'Old Flo', or Birmingham's flogging off of sites occupied by John Madin's Library and NatWest tower, there are no buyers waiting in the wings. Unlike the Tricorn, the building is structurally sound, it works, and it is popular, winning the Lancashire Evening Post's poll for best building in the city - no mean feat when the Harris is nearby. Like the Tricorn, there are several plausible plans for its redesign and reuse, to sort out its problems with circulation, its excessive size, and so forth. Preston and its architecture have been, through the council's philistinism, in the news for the first time since, well, the 1960s. Every council wants an Iconic, nationally recognised building. Preston now has one. So why not appeal to Lancashire County Council's good sense, and mount a council-sponsored campaign to save the building? It still seems like the most plausible reason is that they really do want to replace the Bus Station with a surface car park, in the hope that one day a developer will want to build them a mall. After (or rather during) the massive game-changer that is the financial crisis and the obvious bankruptcy of cities built on debt, shopping and driving in and out, Labour councillors - in both Lancashire and Preston - still can't think of anything their cities might be other than shopping centres. In fact, austerity now gives them an even better alibi. Can't you see - we've got no choice...

Petition to save Preston Bus Station is here.

*one of whom told me a story about this delightful new hotel, that he'd been the only councillor to vote against it when it was in planning. When asked why, he said 'because it's a terrible piece of architecture'. He was told 'that's nothing to do with us'.

Placeholder

I'm not going to declare this blog defunct quite yet - I have some intentions for it, if I ever get the time - but it should be recorded here that I have the following publications out now. Both are on architecture and politics and both are sort-of topical via location with certain current sports events, if only through happenstance.

A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain

this records at great length, in three-dimensional form, architectural and political impressions of Chatham, Gravesend, Dartford, Barking, Silvertown, Poplar, Stratford, Middlesbrough, Billingham, Redcar, Preston, Barrow-in-Furness, Birmingham, West Bromwich, Walsall, Coventry, Bristol, Brighton and Hove, Croydon, Sutton, Plymouth, Oxford, Leicester, Lincoln, Merthyr Tydfil, Ebbw Vale, Tredegar, Blackwood, Newport, Edinburgh, Leith, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Cumbernauld, Belfast and the City of London.

Across the Plaza: the Public Voids of the Post-Soviet City

this records across much shorter length and in e-book form, architectural and political impressions of public squares in St Petersburg, Berlin, Kharkov, Warsaw, Łódź, Katowice, Ljubljana, Kiev and Moscow. Available in Russian!

More soon, or if not soon, eventually.

Pull the Units Down

Despite earlier gripes I'm going to be giving several talks about Uncommon over the next month or so; one at the Architectural Association in London (of all places) on 10th November; one in Oxford as part of their Zero Books Season on 15th November; and another in Zagreb at the Centre for Drama Art on 17th November (no link as yet). There's also a campaign to make 'Cunts are Still Running the World' Xmas number 1. As you can see above it is a cause richly worth supporting.

Talks on other matters, connected to another thing, more of which will be revealed presently: I'll be expounding on post-Soviet squares in Cambridge on 8th November; on the paradoxes of modernism and conservation at the ASCHB on 9th November; on the 'socialist skyscraper' at the Historical Materialism conference on the 11th; and at Pushkin House in London I'll be taking part in a season on Constructivism, laterally connected with the current RA exhibition: one solo talk on Communist Constructivism on 23rd November, and taking part in a debate on the built legacy of the Soviet avant-garde on the 30th.

Some writings: Urban Trawl in Aberdeen; below, in case missed, long ramble about industry; linked to that, long and equally rambling post on the Lloyds Building for The 80s Blog. I've also written a short text for photographer Robin Maddock's book lovingly depicting that most jolie-laide of British cities, Plymouth, God Forgotten Face.

Go and read these instead: the now-regularly blog-updating Agata Pyzik causing a scrap on matters Ostalgic with this superb Frieze piece; the excellent English-language Polish politics/economy blog Beyond the Transition; Jones the Planner on an English city which oddly hasn't completely screwed itself up; Douglas Murphy on Summerland; and the 70s, 80s and 90s blogs are still generating the best online writing around.

Garden Festival as Crystal Palace

Below is the full version of a piece published on Comment is Free a few weeks ago about a book I found in a bookshop in Lee, and thought 'aha! This is the source of the famous Wienerisation! (which any reader of Robin Carmody will be familiar with). It's about a third or so longer and somewhat less zippy.

There's one thing which the leaders of both of the main parties seem to agree. It is expressed in different ways, and with different degrees of sincerity. For Ed Miliband, it's a question of rewarding the 'producers' in industry rather than the 'predators' of finance capitalism; for George Osborne, 'we need to start making things again'. Yet there's no doubt that both the Conservative Party (from 1979 to 1997) and the Labour Party (from 1997 to 2010) presided over a massive decline in industry and 'production'; both of them favoured finance and services over industry and technology. Yet here is an apparent change of heart. What does it mean, this apparent divide between producer and predator, industrialist and speculator, this apparent desire to turn the long-defunct workshop of the world back into a workshop of some sort?

Answers might lie in a book published thirty years ago, one which was once a fixture of British political debate – the historian Martin J Wiener's 1981 polemic English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit. Keith Joseph handed a copy to every member of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet. But compare it with the rest of his notorious 'reading list' to the Tory cabinet of the early '80s. Most of that list consisted of the classics of neoliberalism – defences of raw, naked capitalism from the likes of Friedrich von Hayek or Milton Friedman, the books which are often associated with an economic policy that decimated British industry. Wiener's book was different. Not an economic tract as such, it was more of a cultural history, and its apparent influences were largely from the left. A short analysis of English political and literary culture, the centrality it gave to literature evoked Raymond Williams; its insistence on the sheer scale of English industrial primacy showed a close reading of Eric Hobsbawm; and by ascribing industrial decline to England's lack of a full bourgeois revolution, it had much in common with Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson's famous 1960s 'thesis' on English backwardness. In fact, Wiener seldom cited right-wing sources at all.

Wiener claimed that British industrial capitalism reached its zenith in 1851, the year of the Crystal Palace, its protomodernist architecture filled with displays exhibiting British industrial prowess. After that, it came under attack from both left and right – in fact, Weiner argues that the left and right positions were essentially indistinguishable. Whether ostensibly conservative, like the Gothic architect Augustus Welsby Pugin, or Marxist, like William Morris, opinion formers in the second half of the nineteenth century agreed that industry had deformed the United Kingdom, that its cities and its architecture were horrifying, that its factories were infernal, and that it should be replaced with a return to older, preferably medieval certainties. Wiener claims the foundation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings as one of this movement's successes – an unprecedented group that, in his account, fundamentally believed that its own era uniquely had no valuable architectural or aesthetic contribution to make.

This horrified reaction to industry, and most of all to the industrial city, affected middle class taste (and Wiener has it that working class taste invariably followed suit) – the ideal was now the country cottage, and if it couldn't be in the country itself, then the rural could be simulated on the city's outskirts, as in the garden suburbs of Bedford Park or Hampstead, followed by the 'by-pass Tudor' of the early 20th century. The real England, insisted commentators of left, right and centre, was the country, despite the fact that since the middle of the 19th century, for the first time anywhere, a majority lived in cities. One of Weiner's sharpest anecdotes concerns a book of poetry about 'England' distributed to soldiers during the First World War. Not one poem even mentioned the industrial cities where those who fought had overwhelmingly come from. By the '20s, competing political leaders posed as country gents, whether the Tory Stanley Baldwin, marketed rather incredibly as a well-to-do farmer, or Labour's Ramsay MacDonald, who presented himself as a simple man of the dales.

This sounds far from a Tory argument. Britain's industrial and urban reality was ignored or lambasted in favour of an imaginary, depopulated countryside, and its industrial might and technological innovation suffered accordingly – what could the Conservative Party possibly find to its taste in this? That becomes clear in the third of Wiener's points. British capitalism, he argues, had become fatally ashamed of capitalism itself. It was embarrassed by the muck, mess and noise of industry, negligent of the great northern cities where that was largely based, and embarrassed at being seen to be 'money-grubbing'. Wiener, like many a leftwinger, argued that this came from the English middle class' love affair with its betters, the usually fulfilled desire of every factory owner to become a country gent, a rentier rather than producer. But he also suggested it came from a misplaced philanthropy, and a pussyfooting discomfort with making a profit from making stuff. In the form of the City of London's finance capitalism it had even found a way to make money out of money itself.

Now the book starts to sound like the Tory Party we know today. British capitalism, it argues, needs to rediscover the free market, the profit motive and the 'gospel of getting-on' that it had once disdained. Wiener's adversaries here become now-familiar Thatcherite punchbags – the BBC, for instance, an institution of paternalist arrogance which haughtily refused to give the public the money-generating entertainment it really wanted; or the Universities, devoted to the lefty talking shop of the 'social sciences' rather than robustly useful applied science. Enter David Willetts. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit divided the Tory Party between those who welcomed this new swaggering capitalism – heirs to 19th century Manchester Liberalism – and those who really were Conservatives, who were horrified by this scorn for the country, old England, conservation and preservation. The Tory Party still tries to balance these two impulses, rather ineptly - Grant Shapps praises garden cities and Philip Hammond raises the speed limit, Cameron advocates concreting over the green belt and Gove slates modernist architecture.

Yet there's a reason why nobody reads this book anymore - because Wiener's central thesis was so resoundingly disproved. He predicts that in bringing back 'market discipline', Thatcher will rejuvenate British industry and the 'northern' values it inculcated – instead, the industrial centres of Tyneside, Clydeside and Teeside, South Wales and the West Midlands, Greater Manchester and the West Riding all faced a cataclysm on such a scale that most have still not recovered. Wiener might have praised cities and industry, but the former usually voted Labour, and the latter entailed strong trade unions. Neither point was to endear them to the new, swaggering capitalism. The cities were even further emasculated; their organs of local government defeated and destroyed, their base of coal, steel, shipbuilding and textiles downsized or simply wiped off the map. How did this happen? Perhaps because of that politer way of making money – the City. Wiener scornfully quotes one Rolls-Royce executive in the 1970s who tells him that he is in the motor industry for pleasure, not for profit; if he just wanted to make money, he says, he'd be in the City. And from Spinningfields in Manchester to Canary Wharf in London, former industrial sites now house the trading floors of banks that had to be bailed out like the lame duck industries of the '70s. And where industry really did transform rather than disappear, it took on new, hidden forms – the exurban business park or the container port, all safely away near the green belt, enabling the fantasy of old England to continue unobstructed.

The book faced a common fate for those who try to separate out finance and industrial capitalism, as if they could be prised apart. Britain is more obsessed than ever with an imaginary rural arcadia which bears less and less resemblance to the places where we actually live, but the profit motive has been strengthened in the process, not limited. It seems amazing at this distance to imagine anyone could have thought otherwise – a counterfactual Thatcherism which revived industrial Britain, with Heseltine's Garden Festivals as the new Crystal Palaces. But what is especially bizarre about the current orthodoxy – from which none of the main parties are exempt – is that Wiener's attack on all but 'useful' moneymaking activities is continued, without the concrete industrial products or technological advances that there was once to show for it. There is a counter-theory, which has it that neither speculators nor small businesses are the real 'wealth creators', but rather the masses who have nothing to sell but their labour. Their voice wasn't heard in Wiener's book, and it isn't heard in the current political debate.

Entertainment can sometimes be hard

I'll also be belatedly launching Uncommon at Bookmarks on Tuesday the 27th September, at 6.30pm. The second actual print review of my largely unnoticed diamat book on Pulp is now in the Wire, and very sweet it is. If you would like to review it my email address is adjacent, but here are some online reviews that were very welcome - the wonderfully named Musical Urbanism, a great Hegel-quoting one at Red Mist Reviews, also ...i can stay and Adelle Stripe's Dark Satanic Mills, who also draws welcome attention to Lisa Cradduck's etchings that so enliven the book; Lisa is also offering signed editions of them via Adelle.

Here are some of the usual bits and bobs - not much in the way of new writing due to moving house and finishing my PhD (but viva still pending). More at Urban Trawl; a review of a compendious book on Communist Fashion in the current Radical Philosophy; a review of two oddly prescient books on the estates of Hackney, for Icon; see also this. There's also some contributions to anthologies or other people's books which I keep meaning to plug on here: I have a 'modest proposal' for Sheffield in Julie Westerman's lovely Brutalist Speculations and Flights of Fancy; a long essay on Brutalism and Heritage for Regenerating Culture and Society; an essay on the early, good stuff in BDP's self-immortalising Continuous Collective; an interview with the artist on post-Soviet metropolis and wilderness in Ruth Maclennan's monograph Anarcadia; and an expanded version of the Soviet chapter from Militant Modernism (with added material based on, like, actually visiting Russia) is in the excellent Star City - The Future Under Communism. But more, much more than this, I've blurbed Andrew Jordan's very fine HMP Haslar socio-fantasy Bonehead's Utopia, which is essential reading.

Coming Home to Roost

Wrote this, from my current Safe European Home. Also, read these, this and this.

Signs of Life

There is below this now-customary round-up an actual blog post, unregurgitated, for the first time in a long time. It's on the hot topic of Simon Jenkins' favourite piece of Polish urbanism and why it is a great deal more complex and interesting than that might imply (or than he probably knows). I'm aware there's not much point in writing about anything now other than how they're all in it together, but here's a few things for light relief. A BD building study on the Unison building in Euston Rd is now up on the Urban Trawl blog; there's a review of Iain Sinclair's Ghost Milk for the Independent; I can be found procrastinating about Renzo Piano's Shard in Artforum; and the Red Pepper piece on why big modernist council estates are in fact a good thing is now online. There's also a nice review of Uncommon in the Morning Star, perhaps fittingly the only review as yet in print. Finally there are lots of new things on Flickr, largely as a means of stopping my hard drive from dying horribly.

Some interesting other things worth drawing your attention to: Meet the Leeds Libraries, a set of public facilities left in disrepair in that Capital of the North; Sunlit Uplands, a set of haunting photographs of Midlands suburbia; a machine that makes the motor vehicle look sensible; a co-operative village skyscraper in China; and an excellent website previously unknown to me on the gentrification of Southwark. And Jones the Planner makes it to insurgent Southampton, site of course of one of the greatest town planning fuck-ups of the last thirty years. And there's stiff competition.