Nostalgia for the 1980s New Romantic scene
Robert Elms recalls the glory days of London’s Blitz Club, where the likes of John Galliano, Boy George and David Bowie danced in outlandish costumes to futuristic electronica
What will the cities of the future look like?
Will they be subterranean, to escape extreme heat; or float in the sky, to avoid overcrowding; or abolish streets entirely, like the Line, now under construction in Saudi Arabia?
Never pour scorn on Croydon
Much derided as a philistine wasteland, the borough has an extremely distinguished history and could serve as a microcosm of Britain itself, says Will Noble
Her weird name was the least of Moon Unit Zappa’s problems
Frank and Gail Zappa’s eldest child describes how the endless battles between her manipulative mother and misogynist father in the 1970s blight the family to this day
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
Building block
We should learn to love our turn-of-the-millennium architecture, says Helen Barrett, starting with the Dome
The beauty of brutalism
Nothing divides the British like modernist architecture. Traditionalists are suspicious of its utopian ambitions and dismiss it as ugly; proponents…
Factory boss
To many people Tony Wilson was a bigmouth Mancunian, brash music impresario and jobbing television presenter. But to the generation…
Punk pioneer
Manchester, in the words of the artist Linder Sterling, is a ‘tiny little world’. Nearly three million people live in…
