#RemoteReading: Staycation Selections ✈️

What better way is there to spend a lockdown than touring around post-Soviet states with Owen Hatherley? Or walking the streets of literary Paris? Or riding around the entire coast of the UK on a broken bike? Or discovering what Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s tenure as Mayor of London can tell us about his disastrous reaction to the pandemic? Or exploring the impact of gentrification on our cities? Or exploring a country that doesn’t exist?

Regeneration Songs

Edited by Alberto Duman, Dan Hancox, Malcolm James and Anna Minton

“A compelling range of passionate voices that together shine a powerful spotlight on the realities of East London’s regeneration, providing a kaleidoscopic compendium of stories behind the generic gloss of the developers’ hoardings.”
—Oliver Wainwright, Guardian

Regeneration Songs is about how places are turned into simple stories for packaged investment opportunities, how people living in those places relate to those stories, and how music and art can render those stories in many different ways.

Nincompoopolis: The Follies of Boris Johnson Douglas Murphy

“A passionate and well-argued demolition job.”
— Guardian

Nincompoopolis examines the built legacy of Johnson’s tenure as London Mayor, from his embarrassing follies to the folly of his policies, and wonders if there’s anything that can be learned from letting someone like him have a go at one the world’s great cities.

A Life Lived Remotely
Siobhan McKeown

“An honest account of the niggling issues and existential angst… that so often undercut the pleasures of so-called “freedom” from the office… Books like this can help build the kind of solidarity sorely needed in the new economy.”
— New Humanist

We’ll Never Have Paris
Edited by Andrew Gallix

“Funny, allusive, clever… an entire volume devoted to the idea that the city can never live up to the Paris of the imagination.”
— Times Literary Supplement

We’ll Never Have Paris explores this enduring fascination with this myth of a bohemian and literary Paris (that of the Lost Generation, Joyce, Beckett and Shakespeare and Company) which also happens to be a largely anglophone construct — one which the Eurostar and Brexit only seem to have exacerbated in recent years.

The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space
Owen Hatherley

“An engrossing and beautifully written book. No one else writes so clearly yet with such elegiac intensity about the symbiosis that exists between history and the built environment, or the lives that are caught, mangled and realised in its midst.” — Lynsey Hanley

Island Story

JD Taylor

“If you want to know what Starkey, Fox, Bryson and Paxman miss, because they travel different roads, this book is for you.”
— Danny Dorling

Island Story weaves histories, experiences and ideas to tell another kind of story: one of rebellion and retail parks, migration and inertia, pessimism and disappearing ways of life, and a fiery, unrealised desire for collective belonging and power.