High-tech architecture aligned with the revival of Victorian values in the 1980s, but did not end up producing the factories of a new period of British creativity, says Owen Hatherley.

The Englishness of high-tech architecture was often discussed in the 1980s. Not necessarily in the 1970s, when Richard Rogers' main opus was in Paris and co-designed with an Italian architect, and when the debt owed by Norman Foster to Buckminster Fuller was a lot more obvious, but in the subsequent decade, when there was something to prove.
It sounds strange now, given the literal decimation of British manufacturing since the 1980s, but a lot of the intellectual background to Thatcherism was predicated on reviving British industry and engineering.
For the right-wing intellectuals of the time, like Martin Wiener in his English Culture and the Design of the Industrial Spirit, post-war architecture, like the politics of the time, was all rather sentimental, what with those lavishly landscaped suburban universities in county towns. In the end, the main high-tech contribution to industrial design was some see-thru vacuum cleaners made in Wiltshire
In theory, letting "lame ducks" die, taking on the trade unions and lifting restrictions would have meant an explosion of British creativity and derring-do. Foster or Nicholas Grimshaw would be our new Joseph Paxtons and Brunels, creating new forms and new consumer goods to rival the Japanese and the West Germans.
In the end, the main high-t...