"High-tech now looks very much like another post-imperial delusion"

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, wh