Over the past four years, as shut-down shops and crass new towers have filled our cities, Owen Hatherley has busily constructed a cult reputation as the angry young man of British architecture criticism. His leftwing politics, quick put-downs and, perhaps above all, the sense that he speaks for a rarely represented generation that has not benefitted from gentrification, the property ladder and the other urban booms of the last 30 years, make his books fierce and original.

They are also sad. This sometimes exhausting travelogue is a loose sequel to 2010's A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, which was an unforgiving examination of the glassy, brittle buildings of the Thatcher and Blair eras and also a defence of, and lament for, the postwar concrete landscape they replaced. A similar melancholy fills A New Kind of Bleak. Gazing at the beached whale exterior of Preston's sweeping 60s bus station, celebrated by some but long threatened with demolition, Hatherley writes: "It's the very model of a civic building - taking something everyday and ennobling it." Yet inside, he acknowledges, "the original signage battles with recent tat, a good scrub is overdue, and the clocks have stopped."

Since 2010, the recession has given many of his beloved municipal structures a stay of execution. Except in the ever shinier city-state of central London, their replacement by malls and "luxury" flats has almost halted. From Bradford to Edinburgh, British cities have great holes in the ground where tacky 21st-century buildings were supposed to be. This leaves Hatherley feeling mildly relieved and vindicated, but also with a tricky subject this time round: "an interregnum, a time in which the new has not yet been born". The coalition "have not created a specifically new space; nothing has been built in the new Enterprise Zones, few Free Schools have been planned, no Localist housing schemes are on the drawing board."

His solution is to criss-cross the country even more energetically than in this book's predecessor. With a politically pointed preference for public transport and walking, he visits the winners of the British urban economy since the 70s, places still prosperous and confident-seeming despite the current slump  Brighton and Oxford, Aberdeen and Edinburgh  and the losers  Middlesbrough, the Welsh valleys, parts of the west midlands. Noting the wasteland and lack of recent buildings in the centre of Walsall, he writes mordantly: "The boom clearly hasn't reached this far, although the crash most certainly has."

Nearby in West Bromwich he assesses a lonely monument to the Blair-era belief that single, spectacular buildings could spark vaguely defined regeneration. The Public, "a gigantic, purple Big Shed" designed by the then fashionable architect and city visionary Will Alsop as an all-encompassing local arts venue, briefly went into administration before it even opened in 2006. "Opulently overstuffed" with garish, childish decorative details, The Public seemed a likely folly even in less austere times. Nowadays, concludes Hatherley, "it's hard to suppress the urge to vandalism."

Yet elsewhere he does find a few buildings for which to be grateful to New Labour. In Barking in east London, he notes "robust" recent terraced houses by some less famous architects whom he describes as "sober brick austerity types". Elsewhere, he praises designs for being "serious" or "careful", for their "severity". The built environment he prefers is brooding, craggy, proletarian, industrial, unapologetically northern  even the end-of-the-road nuclear submarine-building town of Barrow-in-Furness  rather than southern, suburban, aspirational, faux-Mediterranean.

Hatherley grew up in Southampton and lives in London, so there may be a touch of the hair-shirt to his tastes. But one of his many strengths as a critic is an ability to express ambivalence  a welcome surprise given the certainties of his politics. In Barrow, he finds the vast submarine factory both horrifying and "genuinely astonishing, a Death Star clad in corrugated metal  the size of several towerblocks stacked end-to-end". The book climaxes with an exhilarating exploration of the City of London, which reluctantly acknowledges that its profit-graph spikes and plunges are probably modern Britain's best piece of large-scale urban design. Yet he never relaxes his conviction that this architecture is, as he puts it, "the exterior decoration of evil".

Not every chapter here is as successful. A long and digressive introduction contains sections of polemic and political generalisation that suggest a rising, multi-tasking writer stretching his opinions a little too thinly. And elsewhere, for all Hatherley's invigorating depth of historical reference, there are occasions when his travelogue feels too impressionistic. A generally approving inspection of Edinburgh concentrates on the stony magnificence of the wealthy city centre, and only fleetingly mentions the fact that most of the poor live on distant council estates. Given Hatherley's authority on the latter (for one thing, he grew up on one), his verdict on this shabbier outer Edinburgh would have been worth having.

There are also tantalisingly brief treatments here of recent, often highly political disruptions to the British urban landscape: last summer's riots, last year's student marches and occupations, the Occupy encampments. From flaming barricades to police kettles, all these generated their own, temporary architecture; so has the recession itself, with its emptied-out high streets, and the remaking of city centres, for good or ill, that they suggest. But it is not a prospect that Hatherley explores.

Such omissions may well be rectified in future volumes. In the meantime, there are more than enough fresh insights and images here to be getting on with. The best, most thought-provoking passage of all is a series of interviews with members of Building Design Partnership [BDP], long-established modernist architects who once called themselves socialists and were among his heroes. Meeting one of the firm's key postwar figures, now very old, "I ask about Preston Bus Station [which BDP designed]  He points out that he has been lobbying and preparing plans for its replacement with a shopping mall."

Architects can change the world, Hatherley's early writing often excitedly and excitingly declared. This book suggests that more often the world changes them.

 Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out is published by Faber.