This article is taken from the December/January 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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In 1888, John Edward Bodley, a superbly moustachioed scribbler, crossed the Atlantic to roam Canada on its newly completed railways. He was the former secretary to Charles Dilke, a Liberal MP who had popularised the idea that the bits of the Empire heavily settled by British emigrants could become a “Greater Britain”, a strong, self-governing federation of Anglo-Saxon democracies.

Visits to Canadian cities helped Bodley to gauge how his chief’s imperial idea was faring. As a college chum of Oscar Wilde and a celebrated Francophile who lived in a series of rented chateaux, Bodley had aesthetic standards that Canada struggled to meet. Vancouver was an “amazing town”, but only because it had been so quickly rebuilt after a big fire and was the “least ugly new settlement I have seen”.

“Straggling” Toronto reminded him “of the dreary suburbs of nearer London, of Camberwell and Hammersmith”. Owen Hatherley, who writes from an ex-council flat in Camberwell, revives the whistlestop tour of Greater British cities in his latest book, not so much to celebrate as to exorcise imperial fantasies.

The introduction to Artificial Islands is much exercised by the Anglo-American right wingers who in recent years disinterred Greater British thinking, urging an alliance of low-tax, free enterprise states whose people share values, language, ethnicity and whiteness. Hatherley has collected here reports on his pre-pandemic visits to Canadian and Australasian cities to test the cogency of the canzuk dream.

Earlier books by this acerbic, scholarly flâneur have brilliantly explored the complex impact on European cities of vanished empires, from the Habsburgs to the Soviets. Here his quest begins at Queen Victoria’s Osborne House, rather than the Kremlin, and seeks material memories of her rather than Franz Joseph or Stalin; but the method and the thrill of the chase are the same.

Greater Britain never got off the ground to start with

Is canzuk revivalism scary enough to need book-length refutation, especially after the implosion of Truss and Kwarteng’s Unchained Britannia? Greater Britain never got off the ground to start with. Sentimental ties to Britain could be strong in what became the Dominions — especially in Canada, where statues of Victoria staked the claim that it was Not America. Settlers and their descendants trooped off to die in Britain’s wars. Yet there was no appetite for the economic integration with Britain that would have made the dreams of Bodley and other imperial patriots a reality.

Canadians and Australians were nationalists before they were imperialists and stuck with economic protectionism. As for the British, Hatherley argues they never sustained a lively sense of colonials as kith and kin. Whatever affinity there was waned over time, just as its lumpen architectural expressions are now overlooked. Trehearne and Norman’s Africa House on Kingsway, England’s Ringstrasse, now houses a superior Wetherspoons.

Rather than kinsmen, Australians are just Neighbours to Hatherley’s youngish generation — and even that show has ended. Liz Truss, who spent a formative childhood year near Vancouver, may have launched some canzuk flourishes in foreign or trade policy, but they seem to have perished along with her administration.

It does not much matter that the book’s target is overblown, because Hatherley’s accounts of walking Dominion cities display the intuitive feel for place, epigrammatic flair and caustic impatience for cant which make him a successor to the great urban explorers. He can make Auckland or Ottawa interesting, just as J.B. Priestley animated Bury and Blackpool and Ian Nairn made the case for Pimlico and Newcastle. His irritation with all things canzuk spurs him to show very effectively that none of the cities he visits were part of what one of Dilke’s contemporaries called the “expansion of England”.

It is not that obstinate efforts to replicate Home were lacking, especially when it came to emblems of state: cathedrals and palaces. You can find copies of the Isle of Wight’s Osborne House in Melbourne and Montreal. Visiting Ottawa in January, Hatherley is fascinated to discover a sub-zero Westminster, a “Durham on the tundra” composed of over-sized Gothic offices often built long after they ceased to be fashionable in Britain. Elsewhere, though, the efforts to foist an old society onto a radically new place produced unexpected aesthetic results.

The builders of gold-rush Melbourne went to work on a blank landscape after graziers had driven off or killed most of the native Aboriginals. The need to make meaning in a cultural vacuum generated a “bits and bobs” architecture of eye-popping eclecticism.

This “Featurism” embarrassed a later generation of Aussie modernists: its exoticism, frantic jolliness and indifference to the local environment had produced “the Australian ugliness”. But Hatherley, who has a dry sense of fun and knows not to confuse morality with architecture, finds it compellingly weird.

Both Flinders Street railway station, a mustardy exercise in “beefy baroque” bristling with vaguely Moorish domes, and a “Saracenic” cinema have even less to do with England than with Australia. But they are as visually splendid as they are thoroughly imperial: the product of an empire which was less “white” than many of its admirers liked to acknowledge.

Hatherley’s riveting exploration of Montreal is the most convincing statement of his case that colonial cities are an unexpected remix rather than an extension of England. Montreal is sometimes called “European” or “French” in feel. It is in fact a palimpsest of competing French and Anglo-American traditions of capitalism and urbanism. The British conquest of Quebec, and its ferocious winters, have made Montreal’s older buildings an agreeable fusion of Edinburgh and Normandy, a peace treaty in stone.

Early adoption of cars produced cities annoyingly non-European

That aesthetic accord continued throughout the 19th century as English money piled into the city. Hatherley passes Ultramontane churches and early skyscrapers of North American rather than politely British heights, as well as grain silos whose stonking functionalism impressed Le Corbusier.

The rise of secessionist Quebec nationalism in the 1960s broke the architectural peace deal. The “Quiet Revolution” stopped the supply of skyscrapers, as English speakers and American capital fled to Toronto. But it also portended sweeping alterations in the city’s fabric as French-speakers tried to imagine a Montreal outside not just Canada but the British Empire.

That meant banning English signage as well as building a new, insurgent city, much of it underground. The dramatic stations of a new metro were decorated with portraits of Montreal’s real (which was to say, French) founders and connected with a gigantic web of underground passageways and halls: a Ville Souterraine designed to shield shoppers from the cold.

This consummately artificial subterranean city is thrilling enough, but it is no monument to decolonisation. The quiet revolutionaries, who had read Frantz Fanon, claimed to be the wretched of the earth, “white negroes” under the heel of English then American capitalists. That insistence sat oddly with their pride in the French adventurers who had first built Mont Royal on the ruins of an indigenous city, Hochelaga.

Because Hatherley understands imperialism as chiefly an economic phenomenon, driven by the anxiety of the rich to find somewhere to park their savings, rather than by racism or Christian evangelism, he doubts that architectural gestures can do much to undo it. In Melbourne, Hatherley finds a building whose balconies are sculpted into an oversize portrait of Barak, an Aboriginal who failed to stop the takeover of his lands. It is a block of luxury student flats.

He finds that the curators of Canada’s art galleries have embraced a “hyper-theorised form of noble savageism”, telegraphing both their embarrassment at the very existence of their cities and their preference for the idealised nature wisdom of First Nations. Away from “decolonised” artefacts and spaces, however, oil is drilled, rare minerals dug and forests felled on lands originally taken by force or fraud.

Colonial cities might, then, be diverting aesthetic riddles, but they are also records of socio-economic facts, in which progress and brutality are unavoidably mingled. Sometimes the ugliest ones are the most instructive. For all its hyped “liveability”, Auckland dismays Hatherley: a car-clogged sprawl of unassuming detached houses, it is “West Bromwich in paradise”.

As he concedes though, the space and energy-hungry suburbs which ring it, and many other Dominion towns, were the creation of powerful (if xenophobic labour) movements, which won a high standard of living for white working classes who valued their privacy and independence. Early adoption of cars did the rest, producing cities which are annoyingly non-European in their disdain for density or public transport. Hatherley thinks they could sort out their problems by leaving not just Britain behind, but capitalism — a Marxist diagnosis which has at least the virtue of simplicity.

In practice, more incremental solutions might be possible, which will mean scrapping the outdated ideas about planning and transport which still dominate the former Dominions. In Vancouver, the Squamish First Nation are about to build a futuristic, carless neighbourhood of skyscrapers on the small reserve which was all colonialism left to them. It is a twist that might have appalled and would certainly have amazed John Edward Bodley.