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.