Before the Blitz: the dynamism of British architecture
Many competing styles flourished in the interwar years, including functionalism, art deco, neoclassicism, seaside moderne, mock-Mayan and Egyptian revivalism
The proposed cities of the future look anything but modern
The vision for California Forever, an American utopian city still at planning stage, is pure picture-book nostalgia of bicycles, rowing boats and tree-lined streets
Why do the British still dream of bricks and mortar?
For the past century, a ‘property-owning democracy’ has been envisaged as a kind of magic cure for social ills. But high prices now mean the opposite of emancipation for many
In praise of the Dome
We should learn to love our turn-of-the-millennium architecture, says Helen Barrett, starting with the Dome
Abstract and concrete: the beauty of brutalism
Nothing divides the British like modernist architecture. Traditionalists are suspicious of its utopian ambitions and dismiss it as ugly; proponents…
Celebrating Tony Wilson, the founder of Factory Records
To many people Tony Wilson was a bigmouth Mancunian, brash music impresario and jobbing television presenter. But to the generation…
The man at the heart of punk: the late Pete Shelley recalls his Buzzcocks years
Manchester, in the words of the artist Linder Sterling, is a ‘tiny little world’. Nearly three million people live in…
