The Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs


Book Description

Guest-edited by Owen Hatherley, thirty-three writers; architects, activists, and Londoners present thirty-three essays exploring famous and unheralded buildings, streets, estates and neighbourhoods across the thirty-three London boroughs.00With contributions from columnist Aditya Chakrabortty to the historian Gillian Darley, via playwright Hanif Kureishi and the politician Emma Dent Coad, the Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs is a journey into the neighbourhoods, housing estates and public buildings of London?s rich urban landscape.00Encompassing everything from Brutalist Polish community centres to suburban garden cities, from pioneering modernist estates to ornate Victorian greenhouses, as seen through everything from grime videos to the films of Patrick Keiller, this book will be a refreshing journey into the city you have been missing, and a celebration of the buildings, places and landscapes which make it special.00In reimagining our guidebook this year we set out to create a book that is as interesting to handle as it is to read. A thoughtful approach to typography and printing conceived by Studio Christopher Victor will bring together the longer essays with highlights from Open City?s extended network of community groups. Richly illustrated with images and artefacts from some of the city?s vast and eclectic museum collections and archives that have remained closed to the public throughout the pandemic, the guide will be offset-printed in London using premium book papers and metallic spot colours.




Public House


Book Description




Peter Salter


Book Description

Peter Salter is an architect and teacher (at the Architectural Association, the University of East London, the University of Bath, and the Welsh School of Architecture) whose work has influenced several generations of students. Walmer Yard, in Notting Hill, is his first residential project in the UK and one of only a small number of buildings he has completed worldwide. Although modest in scale, the project is extraordinary in many ways. On an irregularly shaped site, Salter's design brings four houses into a complex relationship with each other, half-formal, half-familiar, interdependent yet solitary. Similarly, the relations among the core team who developed the design are more nuanced than in most architectural projects, since they all met at the Architectural Association in Peter Salter's unit, where Crispin Kelly (the client) and Fenella Collingridge (Peter's current collaborator) were student contemporaries. This book documents the project with Peter Salter's original pen-and-ink drawings and H�l�ne Binet's extraordinary photographs.




Open House London


Book Description

Open House London has become a landmark event in the capital's calendar, with a quarter of a million people attending the event and queues to enter buildings snaking down streets. This title provides a glimpse into 100 of the buildings that have taken part in the event.




William Morris and his Palace of Art


Book Description

William Morris and his Palace of Art is a comprehensive new study of Red House, Bexleyheath; the only house commissioned by William Morris and the first independent architectural work of his close friend, Philip Webb. Morris moved in to Red House as an ebullient young man of 26, with an independent income and a head brimming with ideas and the persistent question of ‘how best to live? Red House, together with its Pre-Raphaelite garden, stands as the physical embodiment of his exuberant spirit, youthful ambition, passionate medievalism, creativity and great sense of possibility. For five intense years from 1860–5, it was a place of halcyon days – happy family life, loyal friendship, good humoured competition, and the jovial campaign of decorating; furnishing the house and designing the garden. Drawing on a wealth of new physical evidence, this book argues that Red House constitutes an ambitious and critical chapter in his design history. It will re-consider the inspiration it provided for the founding of ‘the Firm’ of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (later Morris & Co.), in 1861, and the vital collaboration of Webb, Burne-Jones, Rossetti and their intimate circle in realising Morris’s dream for his house.




Derelict London: All New Edition


Book Description

______________________________ The huge word-of-mouth bestseller – completely updated for 2019 THE LONDON THAT TOURISTS DON’T SEE Look beyond Big Ben and past the skyscrapers of the Square Mile, and you will find another London. This is the land of long-forgotten tube stations, burnt-out mansions and gently decaying factories. Welcome to DERELICT LONDON: a realm whose secrets are all around us, visible to anyone who cares to look . . . Paul Talling – our best-loved investigator of London’s underbelly – has spent over fifteen years uncovering the stories of this hidden world. Now, he brings together 100 of his favourite abandoned places from across the capital: many of them more magnificent, more beautiful and more evocative than you can imagine. Covering everything from the overgrown stands of Leyton Stadium to the windswept alleys of the Aylesbury Estate, DERELICT LONDON reveals a side of the city you never knew existed. It will change the way you see London. ______________________________ PRAISE FOR THE DERELICT LONDON PROJECT ‘Fascinating images showing some of London’s eeriest derelict sites show another side to the busy, built-up capital.’ Daily Mail ‘Talling has managed to show another side to the capital, one of abandoned buildings that somehow retain a sense of beauty.’ Metro ‘Excellent . . . As much as it is an inadvertent vision of how London might look after a catastrophe, DERELICT LONDON is valuable as a document of the one going on right in front of us.’ New Statesman ‘From the iconic empty shell of Battersea Power Station to the buried ‘ghost’ stations of the London Underground, the city is peppered with decaying buildings. Paul Talling knows these places better than anyone in the capital.’ Daily Express ‘[London has an] unusual (and deplorable) number of abandoned buildings. Paul Talling’s surprise bestseller, DERELICT LONDON, is their shabby Pevsner.’ Daily Telegraph ______________________________




Unseen London


Book Description

The original edition of Unseen London. Peter Dazeley has gained access to the hidden interiors of some of London's most iconic buildings, from Tower Bridge to Battersea Power Station, Big Ben to the Old Bailey. His photographs of these buildings - some derelict, but many still working - are astonishing. Here is a collection of some 50 extraordinary locations, with a thoughtful text by Mark Daly which tells the story of how each of these places was created, how they are used, and what they reveal about the currents of power flowing through the city. Unseen London takes you backstage at some of the capital's great theatres, into the changing rooms of some of our greatest temples of sport, into the heart of the Establishment, the boiler room of the city's infrastructure and behind the scenes at some of the most opulent buildings in the Square Mile.




Housing and the City


Book Description

Housing and the City explores housing histories, theories, and projects in diverse geographies. It presents a geographically dispersed history of the twentieth-century modern housing project and its social diagram, juxtaposed with case studies from the past and the present that suggest that we can live and work differently. While the contributions are diverse in their theoretical approach and geographical situation, their juxtaposition yields transversal connections in the conception of the home and the city and highlights the diversity of architectural solutions in the formation of housing and its communities. The collection also reveals architecture’s contribution to the construction of the self and communities, the individual and the collective—as both urban spatial entities and socio-political concepts. Housing and the City provides essential reading for students, academics, and practitioners interested in the history, theory, or current design of housing. At a time when cities are witnessing new ways of working, changing social demographics, increased geographical mobility, and mass migrations, as well as the pervasive threat of the climate crisis—all trends exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic—Housing and the City presents a historical and theoretical reflection on the question: what does it mean to be at home in the city in the twenty-first century?




10 Nights


Book Description

"When Yasser decides to take part in itikaf, sleeping and fasting in the mosque for the last ten nights of Ramadan, he soon regrets his decision. But as he navigates smug worshippers, shared bathrooms, and recurring thoughts of chunky chips, Yasser's isolation forces him to confront a side of himself he's been trying to keep hidden."--Publisher's description.




Eric Lyons and Span


Book Description

Due to popular demand we are delighted to offer this new paperback edition ofEric Lyons and Span. Lavishly illustrated and deeply researched, this book celebrates the work of the architect Eric Lyons OBE (1912-1980), whose famous post-war housing - that today would be marketed as 'lifestyle housing' - is as well-loved today as it was vibrantly successful when first constructed. Built almost entirely for Span Developments, its mission was to provide an affordable environment "that gave people a lift". Influenced by Walter Gropius, Lyons brought a commitment to high density housing and the idea of fostering community into his Span work without compromising his intuitive sensitivity for landscape. His success brought the practice an impressive array of awards and led to a term as President of the RIBA. The enduring success of his design philosophy can be traced forward to 2005, when Span received a special Housing Design Award given to schemes that meet the current Sustainable Communities Plan. Indeed, the concept of Span mirrors current best practice thinking in housing design and continues to offer a fresh, relevant challenge to volume housebuilders in Britain today. This book serves as a lively reminder of that fact. Written by distinguished historians, practitioners and Span enthusiasts, the book has been researched using the archive compiled by Ivor Cunningham, one of Lyons ex-partners while a detailed gazetteer contains scale plan drawings of many of Spans housing templates.