I’m a writer and editor living in south-east London.

I work as a freelance writer, most often for Architectural Review, Jacobin, the London Review of Books, Sidecar and Tribune. I’m the author of seventeen books on aesthetics and politics, including Militant Modernism (Zer0, 2009),  A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010), Landscapes of Communism (Penguin, 2015), Red Metropolis (Repeater, 2020) and Modern Buildings in Britain – a Gazetteer (Penguin, 2022). My most recent books are Transitional Objects (the modernist, 2023), an annotated photobook about Poland in the 2010s, Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects (Repeater, 2024), about social housing and public transport in New York and Washington DC, and The Alienation Effect (Penguin, 2025), a history of Central European artists and intellectuals in Britain and their influence on public life between the 1930s and 1970s.

As an editor, I put together The Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs for the annual Open House festival in 2020, was the culture editor of Tribune between 2018 and 2023, and a commissioning editor at Jacobin between 2022 and 2025. I’m the presenter and writer of a podcast about urbanism and political change, Inter-Cities, for Open City London, and I wrote and presented The Story of Solent City, a documentary for Radio 4.

I was born in Southampton in 1981, where I was educated at Cantell School and Taunton’s College. I moved to London in 1999 to study for a BA and an MA at Goldsmiths College, and then studied for a doctorate at Birkbeck College, supervised by Esther Leslie. I received my PhD in 2011; it was published in 2016 by Pluto Press, as The Chaplin Machine – Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde.

I occasionally appear on podcasts and on the radio, and have given talks and lectures at various universities, galleries and bookshops from Kirkenes to Auckland. I have also scripted and presented two short documentaries, From Rock to Rubble, on the post-1996 replanning of Manchester, for the Guardian (2010), and Brutal Beauty, on the Czech and Slovak Embassies in London, for the Czech Centre (2021).

I was once in The Blogosphere, where I kept Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy (2006-2017), The Measures Taken (2005-2009) and Urban Trawl (2011-2014), and later, regrettably, a short-lived Medium blog on British politics (2020). I no longer participate in The Discourse on social media, but I still post regularly on Instagram, Flickr, Letterboxd and Goodreads.

I am represented by Nicola Barr, at Rye Literary Agency.