The Ministry of Nostalgia by Owen Hatherley review – a curse on the Mumfords, Jamie Oliver and beards

It's not just the mania for Keep Calm and Carry On " Britain's most provocative writer on architecture targets the fashionable revival of mid-20th century aesthetics

The writer and critic Owen Hatherley has become something of a sage of modernism in recent years. Casting his gaze over the built and pop-cultural landscapes, he sorts the echt from the phoney with all the moral certainty of a Ruskin or a Carlyle. His latest book - his sixth - is a short, stimulating polemic against a suite of aesthetic and political motifs united under the promising term, "austerity nostalgia".

For Hatherley, austerity nostalgia is exemplified by the fetishisation of mid-century Danish furniture; by the coveting of the ex-council flat over the suburban maisonette; by the design aesthetic of the home goods shop Labour and Wait. Austerity nostalgia announces itself in san serif fonts. It glories in the stripped-down design of the underground network and the homely experimentalism of the GPO film unit.

Related: Keep Calm and Carry On - the sinister message behind the slogan that seduced the nation