This is what austerity looks like: a nation surviving on the results of what conservatives privately call the progressive nonsense of the Big Society agenda. In a journey that begins and ends in the capital, but takes in Belfast, Aberdeen, Plymouth and Brighton, Hatherley explores modern Britain’s urban landscape and finds a short-sighted disarray of empty buildings, malls and glass towers. Yet while A New Kind of Bleak anatomizes broken Britain, Hatherley also looks to a hopeful future and discovers fragments of what it might look like. Illustrated by Laura Oldfield Ford, author and artist of Savage Messiah.